Filth
by always-this-serious
Summary: Sapped of his quirk, Togata Mirio was forced to watch Eri slip from his fingers, the heroes arriving just too late to save her. Now, thirteen years later, Mirio once again comes face to face with Eri herself - now a young woman; one with a secret to keep. (AU) (Mirio x Adult!Eri...?)
1. Prologue

**A/N: Well hello there everybody! Welcome to my latest fic. ;) Note that this prologue takes place at the end of Episode 74 / the beginning of Episode 75, and that naturally the rest of the story will be AU. **

**Looking forward to hearing all your thoughts! Please do follow, favourite and review~**

* * *

Prologue

_13 Years Ago_

The blood blossomed out from his side in sickly warmth. Lemillion couldn't move.

Before him, before his wavering sight, images played out in a soundless montage – a red cape billowing, growing threadbare in the wind; his father's smile, fading; and somewhere, somewhere just within Lemillion's reach, a sunset. Lengths of shadow through his bones, silhouettes of memory leaking out from his veins. He could feel it. Could feel himself slipping. And though he willed strength to his fingertips, pleaded for his body to move, he knew it was over.

She was quiet behind him. Quiet and unmoving, though Lemillion imagined that beneath his feet the ground trembled with the way she shivered.

Eri. He twisted his neck upon his shoulders to see her, that little white face a stunning contrast to the crimson of his cape. Eri-chan. Gazing at him. Gazing at him with all the horror he couldn't bear to see. He'd saved her – he was supposed to save her! But he couldn't stop the flaming agony as it branched through his lungs. Behind a hazy curtain of silver, blurs and distortions dropping across his vision, he couldn't stop the screaming pain. The stabbing in his side. The foiling weakness as his blood oozed from his body.

_Did you want to become a hero that badly? _The voice. That man. Lemillion kept his eyes on Eri and tried his best, gave it his all, to smile. Because a hero would smile. A hero would smile for a little girl who couldn't smile for herself. Even when he could do nothing else. _Did you want to save Eri that badly, Lemillion? _That man, coming close, sending a seething rage like poison through Lemillion's sinews, filling the hollows from which his power had slipped. From which his quirk had vanished and drained. But there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could do to stop it as tears filled Eri's eyes.

"It's all a filthy disease of our time," Overhaul hissed, and Lemillion quivered with anxious agony. "I'll fix guys like you. With Eri's power, _I'll fix guys like you_."

Eri. Lemillion said her name, the syllable a petal off his tongue, and she quivered. Quivered like a white flower in a storm.

A man in white, the one named Chronostasis, swooped in from some unseen corner. He swooped in like a ragged white vulture and scooped Eri up in his arms as though she were a limp, lifeless doll. And she, dewy eyes transfixed upon Lemillion, did nothing to resist – too small, too filled with a lifetime of terror to know she could fight. That Lemillion would fight for her.

His heart plunged. His voice rose up in a violent scream as Eri began to recede into a darkening tunnel having opened up from nothing. He screamed her name with all the shattering rasp he could muster, and pushed pushed pushed against the stone sword through his side. Pushed pushed pushed though now, arms going weak with trembling heaviness, his desperation was fruitless. "Don't give up on me, Eri-chan!" he cried, hoping against all hopeless hope that she was listening. "I'm going to save you still! I'll save you!"

And past him in a venomous breeze, Overhaul ambled, gazing at him with a black-gold snake stare. "Die now, Lemillion."

Then he too vanished into the blackness, grazing the walls with his fingertips so that a forbidding door of stone closed in around the tunnel. Leaving Lemillion to scream against the searing lack of breath in his lungs, leaving him to bleed out the thin shreds of his remaining power. Eri! Eri! Eri! A mist closed in around him. His body went limp with the weakness he couldn't endure. Eri! Eri! Eri!

Where was Sir? Where was Tamaki?

Through the bounding flounder of his pulse in his ears, above the wretched pitch of Eri's name upon his voice, Lemillion could hear the heroes arrive. Behind the stone walls. Somewhere far off and disappearing, close by and overwhelming. But where were they? Lemillion felt the consciousness sap out from his body. He fell deeper into a dizzying pain, wordlessly crying out for Nighteye. For Tamaki and Midoriya and Aizawa-sensei and the rest. For Eri, who'd been right at his fingertips but now fell away. Fell away with a hushed, horrible plea.

Where were the heroes?

Why didn't they come?

Eri! Eri! Eri!

* * *

Overhaul stared straight ahead, covered in bloody splatters shaped like stars. Cuts, cuts, cuts all over his clothes and face and hands. Eri waited for him to claw at himself like he did whenever he got dirty, those naked hands scraping at an itchy redness like paint along his neck and cheeks. And Eri waited for him to look at her in the way he always did, those eyes melting golden with silent disgust and for him to tell her something hateful. That this was all her fault.

Because it was – because behind them, falling away ever more into shadowy melancholy, Le Million-san was gasping against bubbles of his own blood. Impaled and dangling in a terrible contortion; the haunting image of his body replaying itself before Eri's helpless sight like something straight out of a nightmare. All tattered whites and reds, that blonde head hanging dull. All because he'd wanted to save her. All because of her.

Eri waited for Overhaul to say so, to say that she was cursed. Eri prepared herself to shrink as small as she possibly could into the white of Chrono's chest as he held her, small enough that perhaps she could slip between the thin threads of material and skin and existence into an invisible, quiet nothing. She shut her eyes against prickling tears. She buried her head into Chrono's shoulder, not because there was any comfort to be had there but because her neck was too heavy to bear the throbbing weight of her skull.

She waited – but nothing came. Overhaul didn't say anything.

Chrono made sure to buckle her up tightly in the backseat of the car. He patted Eri's cheek – _tap, tap_ – the palm of his glove frighteningly hot, and he shut the door. Outside, he and Overhaul spoke in calm, hushed tones like they always did. Words Eri couldn't make out, words she couldn't understand – fixed as her mind was upon image of the hero Le Million as he bled, bled, bled. Drip, drip, drip of blood like apple juice out a box. How his eyes had met hers, how they glowed bluer than any sky Eri had ever seen even though he must have been in so much pain. He'd smiled at her even though he must have been in so much pain!

And he'd screamed louder than anything Eri had ever heard. He'd cried her name like a horror in the night when Chrono had picked her up to take her away.

Chrono took the driver's seat and started the car. Overhaul opened the door on the other side from where Eri sat, and he climbed in next to her. Close to her. Close enough that she could smell the metallic scents of dirt and blood on his skin, and the fading undertones of disinfectant and his soapy aftershave. Smells she knew better than her own reflection. Smells that made her whoozy with fear as Overhaul leaned in towards her. His hand on the seat. Inching close to her legs in the threatening way of a snake through grass.

"Are you going to be a good girl now, Eri?"

Her voice sank into the pit of her stomach. She could only nod.

With a sigh, Overhaul took off his mask. Placed the jeweled, manic thing in the space between them. "We're going to visit some friends somewhere faraway," he said softly. "I hope you won't act selfishly – they're doing us a big favour."

"F-friends?" Eri questioned with all the quivering volume she could spare.

Overhaul stared at her for a long time, his mouth twisting funnily. Not at all like a bird. It was too sharp, too coiling – like the cobras Eri had seen in animal books, all devilish and quiet. She wanted to look away, out the window or at her hands in her lap. Anywhere, anywhere except into Overhaul's eyes. But he held her there, wordlessly daring her to move, until at last he slumped backwards into his seat. Looking tired. Looking monstrous, all shreds and splatters of crimson. "Tell her where we're going, Chrono."

Without tearing his gaze from the windscreen, before which the car's headlights were the only illumination in a hellish stretch of darkness, Chrono said in that easy, teacher voice, "Do you remember the world maps I showed you a few days ago, Eri-chan?" She replied yes. "Do you remember the big country called Russia?" She replied yes, even though in her mind's eye Eri could only muster an image of crinkling paper and lots of twisting, black lines. Blurry black lines without names.

Black lines that curled and crept into oozing dribbles like the blood that slipped out from Le Million's body.

The car went bump over something small. Eri's heart flung itself into her mouth, though Overhaul was perfectly still next to her and Chrono continued a straight drive ahead.

"That's where we're going," Chrono said smoothly. "We're going to fly on a plane to Russia. To Moscow, where our friends stay."

And as a sliver of light opened up in the darkness before them, carrying the car out into a quiet street strange and far, far away from their home and from Lemillion, Eri could do nothing to stop the tears that scalded her cheeks. Could do nothing against the violent yuckiness in her stomach as Overhaul ran his hand through her hair into her nape. Clutching. Squeezing lightly. Lemillion's blood still sticky in his palm.


	2. i

i.

Over the first three or four days in Kagoshima, Mirio rotated through a restless routine without once seeing the city. By day, he flitted with lively energies from meeting to meeting to lunch to meeting – a lukewarm blur of corporate matters and the occasional shot of PR for the Nighteye Agency. By the end of the day, he bided his time by getting to know every inch of his hotel room like a prisoner would get to know their cell. Room service trays with rice bowls and miso. Paper shoji doors and a futon of marvelous comfort. Sakura blossoms in the tokonoma.

Besides spending an unreasonable amount of time flicking through the pay-for-view channels and sipping on shochu from the hotel's very obliging owner, Mirio didn't do much else for the simple fact that after rushing between businesses all day, he was exhausted. Exhausted physically, of course. But also exhausted by the very idea that this would be his life for the next three months: hustling and bustling with Agencies without feeling like he was really achieving all that much.

He didn't complain. He liked the work he did for the Nighteye Agency – and all things considered, he shouldered too much of a debt to Sir Nighteye himself to really say anything otherwise.

But compared to the work he'd dreamed of doing as a child – his cape soaring mighty and red behind him, damsels in his arms and explosions in the background (hah!) – the corporate side of things had always managed to seem rather… bland. Rather passionless. Even after thirteen years. However, pushing through with a smile, Mirio happened to be tremendously good at his job and for the most part enjoyed the stability it allowed him.

More than that, he was glad Sir Nighteye continued to be his mentor and, dare he say it, his friend.

"_You should not overwork yourself, Togata-san,_" Nighteye said that night over the phone. "_Go sightseeing. Do something to relax a little._"

"Ai, ai, Captain!" Mirio replied, and drank from his shochu. "But don't worry about me – I wouldn't want to give you grey hairs!"

Nighteye made a smooth sort of grunt, and in the background Mirio could make out the popping sound of Bubble Girl – who'd opened her own agency but continued to spend a lot of her time, especially her nighttime hours, at Nighteye's side – laughing heartily. "_Too late!_" she cried.

Nighteye had turned fifty one little over two months before, and was wildly unimpressed with the new sheen of silvery-white which had begun to rear itself upon his head. And Mirio and Bubble Girl took great pains to tease him about it, about how he combed his hair constantly in a bid to hide the pale strands, about the box of green dye they'd once found in his office. Mirio himself would be turning thirty one in July – and for the most part, the teasing happened to be an effective way of hiding his own looming fear of grey hairs and wrinkles.

"_There's a ferry to Sakurajima tomorrow morning. I'm booking you a ticket,_" Nighteye said, and somehow Mirio didn't doubt him. "_You could hike up the volcano._"

"No need, no need," Mirio chuckled. "I thought I might head to the market at the bay in the morning and find myself some local cuisine."

"_If I have to call the inn to find that you ordered room service for breakfast and spent your time watching more figure skating on TV–_"

"I'll even send you photos, Sir!"

"_Mmm_."

They said goodnight, and Mirio stewed over his dinner of fish cakes and pickles. Outside, crickets chirped shrilly, and it was possible to hear the faint flush of the bay's unsettled waters. It was a warm night, hot for early spring, and the potent mix of alcohol and a tropical breeze made Mirio lethargic as he lazed about the sitting cushions by the television. The television on which, in shimmering silvers of ice and glitter, the world figure skating championship was being channeled.

Mirio hadn't really planned on going to the market, though indeed there was about the city a tempting air of activity and cheer as the sakura came into bloom: school children clattered about the sidewalks in the morning, uniforms fresh and dark as they went flying towards their first days of school; pubs along the streets brimmed with golden light falling about in smoky sheens in the evenings. This was Mirio's first time in Kagoshima – his first time in the entirety of Kyushu, actually – and honestly, it did seem a waste to bask away his days in the minimalist, traditional glory of his hotel room.

He smiled, sipping again at the bitter taste of his drink, and heaved a full-bodied sigh. A new place to know, new faces to see. Tomorrow was his day off, and it didn't seem the worst idea in the world to start it early with a little amble down to the market. A light bite to eat. A little orienteering. It couldn't hurt, and Mirio could be back to his room in no time to watch the figure skating's quarter finals.

* * *

The city began its bustle early, and at the hour Mirio left there was already a full bloom of people in the street.

There were even more of them at the market, where the smells of blossoms and of frying fish and the sounds of vendors shouting out their stalls' contents met in a bright burst of sensory delights. Feeling out of place amongst the busy focus – housewives doing their weekly round of organic vegetable shopping and gossiping along the paths, little kids buying sweets and squealing with a thrill much too energetic for the hour – Mirio strolled along with unhurried easiness. He smiled at pretty women. He nodded at the stall-owners who tried to sell him yakitori for breakfast and sweet buns for dessert.

At one spot, he bought himself a coffee in a takeaway cup, though it tasted burned and didn't quite settle the hungry twist about his stomach. At another spot, he chatted for a long time with a guy who couldn't have been much more than a teenager but who was wearing an All Might t-shirt – an old one, or rather, one well-loved.

"All Might was one of my old teachers!" Mirio declared with a thrilled grin.

To which the boy replied, "No way! At UA?"

"That's the place!"

"Did you become a pro, then?"

And Mirio was forced to chuckle and shrug his shoulders, as he'd done so many times before in years past, "Nah. Things didn't quite work out that way."

The boy bought him a cup of udon noodles with pork and spring onions, and they spoke for some minutes more at a table next to the water. A far out stretch of blue with the volcanic island rising out black and imposing a stone's skim away. Mirio lingered there for a long time after the boy left, staring out into the bay as it shimmered crystalline under the white glow of morning sun. Boats and ferries bopped. Seagulls flapped jarringly overhead. And Mirio, with a numb sense of tired contentment, considered how much easier it had become – _Nah. Things didn't quite work out that way. _

Before, the wound had been one which refused to close. It had bled out onto pavements, into innocent objects and sounds, and like a tearing pain in his chest Mirio had been able to think of nothing else for months afterwards. Months of avoiding Nighteye's gaze, months of telling his teachers and friends he was sorry. Sorry for what? It wasn't his fault, they'd say, and he wouldn't believe a word of it. His heart would skip several beats when he saw new heroes debut on the news. He'd smile hard and die inside whenever Nejire and Tamaki told him about their work – their promotions and patrols and all their heroic deeds.

They'd spent years trying to find a way to fix him with row upon row of experimental procedures, and new quirks which may have helped, and hunt after hunt for answers.

Mirio had been the one to give up. At least aloud, though he'd seen it in everybody else's eyes. They'd all lost hope way before anyone had actually said so, and Mirio – guilty as he already was for having lost everything all those years before – couldn't stomach having to string them along any longer.

And now, all things considered, he was happy enough with the life he'd been handed. Happy enough at least to enjoy small things without seeing in them all the immensity of his failure. The blue of the water, for example, or the colourful blur of peoples' feet as they scurried by in a day-to-day buzz.

A colourful blur of peoples' feet – and amongst that blur, an apple dropped. An apple rolled, glinting red like a precious treasure discarded, and by some instinctual force Mirio jumped up to grab it from its clumsy circling. "Excuse me, Miss!" he called out graciously, spotting the girl with a basket of apples and reaching his hand out to her shoulder. "You dropped–"

The girl froze. She turned.

She turned in a frightened stiffness under Mirio's palm, and he felt his heart sink like the apple dropped from his hand.

"Oh my god," he choked, and barely managed to rasp her name. "Eri-chan."

Red eyes gleamed back at him, frozen in horror as he felt his own face contort. Those eyes! Those eyes bore a hole through his soul, and in a moment of petrified charm Mirio couldn't move, struck by the sinking fear that this was a nightmare with all the vivid lucidity of reality to make it that much more awful. How many times had those eyes plagued him in his sleep? How many nights had the image of her haunted gaze left him gasping her name?

He wouldn't have recognised her were it not for those eyes and the little horn that poked out from her forehead. He wouldn't have known to whom such watery litheness, such an airy loveliness, could have belonged were it not for the terrified expression with which she met him – just the same as all those years ago.

She said nothing, but glanced desperately about herself as though in search of an escape.

Utterly out of his control, Mirio felt his hands rise to her cheeks, their skin burning feverish beneath his palms as they alighted into a magnificent pink. He held her there, staring hard into the features so harshly seared into his mind – a new grace about them, a freshness quite unlike anything Mirio had ever seen – and he could do nothing against the trembles as they danced into his limbs. He repeated her name, a disbelieving poem. He felt his soul sink into the violent blur of bodies and movement around them before it returned like a rushing ghost into his body.

"It's you," he gasped. His face cracked into a grimace or a smile. "Eri-chan! After all this time!"

But she didn't smile in return. She continued to gawk at him with that heartbreakingly familiar look of horror. "Stop," she murmured, rooted to her place. White curls gracing her cheeks. Chest delicately heaving. "Stop. Before–"

There was a basket slung about her arm, full of apples and colourful plant foods like a trove of organic gems. A white vest to cover her arms, a brightly patterned scarf slung about her chest – she glowed like an angel, a youthful image of porcelain smooth flesh and long-limbed beauty. Mirio's heart floundered about his ribcage like a bee caught under glass, and he had to restrain a cry of pain at the way she flinched away from him. Eri-chan! It was her, full and real in exquisite grace!

"But how…?" he whispered, leaning in though she leaned away. "How did you escape? Overhaul. Where did he–"

"I have to go."

Eri spun on her toes, an image of swirling material and curls, and Mirio's body moved with slicing quickness to grab her wrist. "Wait! Eri-chan! I can't believe it. What happened to you?"

"Lemillion-san." His heart shattered. "_Please_. You can't–"

Out from the crowd with deliberate poise, a hand smacked Mirio's away, and he was confronted by a poisonous glare behind a simple face mask. An unnamed man whose exposed features had about them a sharp femininity like a pale serpent. Mirio didn't know this face, its insipidness only made more glaring by the pointed whiteness of his hair, but the voice was rung with an ominous familiarity. "Excuse me, sir, but I'd prefer if you wouldn't touch the girl," he said in a hiss. Then turning his attention to Eri, touching a gloved hand into the small of her back, the man spoke in a softer lull, "We're done for today, Eri-chan. Let's go home."

The memories replayed themselves in a sickening slow motion – Eri, tiny and silent as she was stolen from him, Mirio, into swallowing darkness; Eri, disappearing and with trails running cold and dead. Mirio trembled, and locked his eyes onto Eri's as she blinked up at him wordlessly. It shook him, how she didn't wince at the other man's touch, how she turned away obligingly and even with a certain relief. Disappearing from him once more – and she was so close! So close he'd touched her! – into the squeezing crowd of people suddenly so suffocating.

Mirio couldn't stop himself. In a dash of brainless movement, his hands were in his clothes until he found what he was looking for.

A business card. His name, his number. Hot in his hand as he shouldered past bodies to keep up with Eri, to drop with desperate hurry the card into her basket so that this time he would be with her. He should have followed. Should have ripped her from the other man's grasp – that gloved hand light and dangling comfortably against her back, making Mirio seethe without explanation – but no. As she glanced over her shoulder at him once more, he could no longer muster the strength into his limbs to move. She watched him as he watched her, an unspoken warning warding him off though his heart pounded after her, tied as his card in her basket.

The sky could have crashed down, the ground could have consumed cities whole. The world could have ended and in that moment, it wouldn't have meant anything. Nothing could have compared to the vivid agony of Eri's face searing itself anew upon Mirio's memory.


	3. ii

ii.

Things would have been better if he hadn't been there. Lemillion-san. The shape of his hands still leaving pinpricks over Eri's cheeks.

Before, their trips to the market had been a small oasis – a little sliver of domestic normality with all the jewel tones of fresh fruits on sale and the gleam of salt water and the sound of busy people going about their busy business. Eri tended to count the hours leading up to market days. Chrono would buy her something sweet. They'd sit for a few minutes at the tables by the water, and Eri would relish the sparkle of sunlight and the taste of fresh air because they were luxuries she hadn't known for years. Years. And they were luxuries which could be stolen from her in moments. Moments. One wrong step and she'd never see Kagoshima's cloud-puffed sky again.

Now – _this_. Those hands on her face. Those blue eyes, gawking at her as though she were a ghost. He'd said her name, and a nightmarish sickness had swum itself into Eri's head. All this time, all these years, nighttime horrors of his dead body had tormented her. He was dead. He was dead and it was because of her. But now here he was: not dead. His hands warmer than Eri remembered and his face older. Softer. Sadder, with a shadowiness about the eyes and a flatness to the smile which Eri knew was her fault. Sadder, but _not dead_.

Chrono had asked Eri how he'd known her – that man. Who was 'that man'? And she'd said she had no idea. He'd only wanted to give her one of the apples she'd dropped.

To say so had left a fluttering acidity in her gut. Eri had never lied to Chrono before. And because she'd never lied to him, he believed her this first time that she did. At least, she chose to think he believed her, though it had been with a certain amount of suspicious glances and double checking that the front door was properly locked when they got home.

But how hadn't Chrono recognised him? That face so garishly familiar, even in its new agedness. How hadn't Chrono recognised him?

Those features had etched themselves onto Eri's heart. Since that very first day, she'd carried them around like a secret, and with all the same vivid lucidity which made her pulse freeze. He, Lemillion, came to her obtrusively and painfully throughout the day whenever she found herself confronted with certain smells or sounds. When she woke up in the morning. When she couldn't sleep – especially then. Lemillion-san. Always looking at her with those burning, blue eyes through the darknesses of her bedroom and memory.

Onto the kitchen counter, one of the maids rushing about somewhere in the scullery and the other off disinfecting something or another, Eri and Chrono laid out the items they'd bought.

Daikon and cucumber of absurd shapes. Radishes in pretty shades of pink and purple. Cabbage. Strawberries and apricots.

And one less apple.

"It's a pity," Chrono said, sounding sorry. "The taiyaki looked very nice today."

Eri didn't know what to say. So she said nothing, keeping her eyes down and willing herself against all the odds not to tremble like a little bird dropped from its nest.

Maybe if she hadn't forgotten her mask today, Lemillion-san wouldn't have known it was her. She could have taken the apple back even though it had touched the ground and was sullied and sick and would have to be thrown into the depths of the bay anyway. She could have stared at her feet, and thanked Lemillion-san with a curt bow, and she and Chrono could have carried on and eaten taiyaki by the water as though nothing at all had happened. If only Eri hadn't forgotten to wear her mask.

Chrono scrunched up the paper bags in which the vegetables had been placed, and threw them into the pile for the maids to burn at the end of the day.

"Perhaps Overhaul will have an idea who that man was," he said, though this time it was more to himself than to Eri.

But she threw her head up, and had to restrain a cry. "He was just being polite," she insisted, and the sound of it was choked even to her own ears. "That man. He wasn't anybody."

An unwieldy pause passed over the kitchen counter. Chrono raised his eyebrows at Eri in a flat questioning, and with a sigh he pulled down his mask to reveal a concerned frown. "You know you're not supposed to speak to strangers, Eri-chan," he said quietly. "If somebody was bothering you, Overhaul needs to know. That was the condition."

"But he wasn't bothering me. He only wanted to give me that apple." Eri's mind reeled, and she tried to blink away the possibilities. Lemillion-san. Overhaul would know exactly who he was if ever they were to meet, and there would be blood on the pavements. Kagoshima's blue sky would stain itself red, and Eri would never be allowed to see Japanese daylight again. "Please. Please don't tell him – just this once," she pleaded in as level a tone she could muster. "That man was just being polite. I promise…"

Chrono pulled his mask back up, taking an apricot and making as though to weigh it in his hand. His eyes dropped from Eri's with a shake of his head. "Go wash up. Overhaul should be back soon and he'll want to see you."

"So you won't tell him?"

"Eri-chan–"

"_Please_. For the taiyaki."

Chrono sighed again, this time with a resignation that brought a relieved curl to Eri's lips. "I'll think about it," he said. "Now go wash."

He turned away to the sink, still rolling the apricot about his hand, and Eri's body weighed itself into the floor. She knew what it was to have secrets. She hid them on the daily in the depths of her heart, forbidden feelings and thoughts and filthy daydreams about running away back to Russia or better still some place she had never been before. Possibilities that would have made Chrono cringe, and ideas that would have made Overhaul – no, not Overhaul, she didn't call him that anymore – tear her to shreds.

But now for the first time, Chrono would keep her secret too. Whenever he said he'd 'think about it' – he'll think about taking her to buy a new dress; he'll think about sneaking in candied nuts for her to eat when no one was there to see it – it always meant yes. And even if he didn't exactly realise he was keeping a secret – he would _never _have done that on purpose – Eri would know.

And in the glowing respite of that knowledge, she slinked away from the kitchen counter. Keeping her eyes on Chrono's back as he washed his fruit under running water, feeling her pulse throb wild through her veins.

A little rectangle of white, out of place upon the floor, caught her eye, and Eri bent with instinctual slowness to pick it up. _Togata Mirio, _she read. _Nighteye Agency_. Followed by a phone number. There was no reason for goosebumps to prick themselves upon her neck; Eri didn't know the name _Togata Mirio _or how such a name could have ended up there on the kitchen floor. Even so, she held the little piece of paper to her chest like a locket, and scurried away with its foreign immensity somersaulting through her mind.

* * *

There were pretty things on her dressing table, marked by memories of Russia and all sorts of shadowy insinuations. The matryoshka doll which hid itself within itself behind a lovely face of paint, always watching over the bedroom with a judging impassivity; the silver music box concealing a spinning ballerina, the music to which she danced a disturbing soundtrack to nights Eri didn't want to remember. Trinkets and sparkling toys meant as gifts; objects which to Eri were chains dipped in glitter.

However, even though they haunted her, representing all the dehumanised fragility she carried on her shoulders, their nooks and crannies made for excellent hiding places for the things Eri would otherwise not be allowed to keep. Newspaper clippings, for example, of the hero named Deku. Or the dried rose head from the first bouquet she'd ever received, salvaged and preserved in secret (because Eri could only accept flowers from one person, and this particular rose head had not been from him). Candied nuts in little pink bags. A Russian postcard from the one time _he_ took her to watch a ballet in Saint Petersburg. As a reward. For being such a good girl.

Although, the postcard wasn't something Eri had to hide considering he himself had bought it for her.

But she did it anyway out of some deluded sense of power and privacy. She could keep the things she loved away from him and he wouldn't be able to break them, dissolve them, hurt them. He wouldn't be able to call filthy what he didn't know (still) existed.

Pinching the card in her fingers and rubbing over its crinkled edges with a charmed tenderness, Eri considered the name again. _Togata Mirio _– and again – _Togata Mirio_. Could it have been him? Was this her little sliver of the living Lemillion-san to cherish? She unpacked the matryoshka doll, laying the disembodied torsos and bottoms across her dressing table in a row, and then folded the card up small as it would go. Perhaps if she folded it enough, pressing corner-to-corner in ever tinier angles, the card would disappear entirely into some unseen cornice of space. Never to be found, for her eyes only. Her secret and his.

She dropped the card into the smallest doll. She packed them all back into themselves, spending much too much time aligning their colourful bodies _just right _and imagining their feathery weight to be _just that much _heavier with the paper inside of them. Indeed, Eri's heart felt heavier. An awe and a curiosity and a terror all mingled to create some confused cocktail of numb emotion, overwhelming enough that Eri was certain she'd be too weak to run her comb through her wet hair, too exhausted from the shock to stay awake until dinner.

The bedroom door – heavy steel, soundproof and leading out into a twisting basement passage – opened, and with a start Eri grabbed her comb and began brushing. Brushing, brushing, brushing like her life depended on it and not making a squeak when the teeth caught onto curling knots as the door closed again behind her.

She hadn't turned the light on – would it look suspicious, her sitting in the dimness like this?

She still wore her white dressing gown – should she have put on something nicer? A dress, perhaps? Or should she have just laid herself naked across the bed and waited for the inevitable while silently pleading with whatever gods would listen that it wouldn't happen tonight?

The bedroom in all its simplicity was plunged into clinical, white light. Eri twisted herself on the chair, swallowing hard against the shudder that reared itself through her spine. Cold hands. Hot face. Growing colder and hotter when her eyes met his – those golden shades boring into her like the slit pupils of a lion.

"Any reason you're sitting in the dark?"

"No," Eri rasped. "I was just distracted."

"Distracted by what?"

Distracted by Lemillion-san and the ephemeral afterglow of the things he'd stirred in her. Eri held her breath and clawed desperately within herself for the right thing to say. "Wondering when you'd be back," she murmured eventually, fingering the patterns on the music box in an excuse to drop her gaze as he came closer. "And if… we could have apple juice with dinner."

It seemed a frail lie, considering the knot in her stomach made the idea of food and even apple juice seem repulsive.

Just beside her now, Eri imagined a monstrous heat from his body along hers. With a gloved hand, smelling vilely of soap, he twirled a piece of her hair between his fingers. With the other, he pulled down his black face mask, unnecessary now in their perfectly sterilized bedroom. "Apple juice?" he repeated skeptically.

Eri nodded. "Yes please, Kai."

"That's not really what you were thinking about."

Her face was level with his chest, and under the dark weight of his attention Eri felt squashed even further. He leaned downwards as though to kiss her, and Eri shut her eyes as though it would hurt. He knew she was lying. It would hurt. But it didn't. His lips didn't meet hers – even though she'd brushed her teeth and had rinsed several times with mouth wash so that she was sure her tongue would burn minty fresh. But no. No kiss. Instead, he pressed his face into Eri's neck and sniffed. Deeply. Like an animal suspicious of its freshly killed prey.

As he always did.

And finding her satisfactory with the dews of cleanliness upon her skin, Kai grazed his mouth over the exposed ridge of her collar bone. Cold lips. Slithering and wet. He lifted a hand to grasp her throat gently – a tender threat – and moved the other to undo the sash around her gown.

Eri's stomach convulsed with a menacing sickness, and despite knowing what was good for her she touched her fingers to Kai's, pulling away. "Wait," she said sheepishly. "Just… please wait a little bit… You only just got back, right? Don't you want to have dinner first? Chrono said he wanted to see you about–"

Running his thumb over the bump in her throat, Kai hissed blandly, "My my, Eri, you're very talkative this evening."

Eri shrank into herself. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

"Get on the bed."

The matryoshka doll cast its judging eye, wide and dark like a Russian fairy, about the room. Inside of it, the teeny shape of Togata Mirio's card glowed like an ember, and Eri imagined the weight of it in her palm. Feeling guilty that her heart should clutch onto something so precious at a time like this – when she felt her dirtiest, when every part of her was to be gouged out like pomegranate seeds from the fruit in a messy extravagance. Trying hard to wipe the image of Lemillion's gentle eyes from her mind, Eri did as she was told and went to the bed. Kai followed quiet and predatory behind.


	4. iii

iii.

Three days. Three days had passed, and Mirio's world had shaken itself from an anaesthetized stupor.

Suddenly, with the vivid clarity of watching life in reverse – a bright series of failures; a fantasy or horror sharpened by the urgency of the hours as they passed – Mirio recalled the smell of his own blood from that day years ago. Metallic through his skull. A prickling at the tips of his fingers as though they still dripped with crimson. And every night, he'd woken with the terrible sense of his own ghost slipping from his chest. Just as Eri had slipped from him. Through his fingers and out from his reach.

He'd woken every night crying Eri's name.

And now he paced the hotel room up and down and around, the world outside black in starry obscurity. He took larger-than-necessary gulps from his sake and his shochu. He waited, waited anxiously for Nighteye's call. Yes, _obviously_ Mirio had told him – he'd just about sprinted home from the market those days ago, heart frozen in his chest and head spinning with a sick horror and excitement. Eri! Oh, Eri! Just as he'd done in all his nightmares, he'd almost wept when saying her name over the phone to Nighteye.

Everyone had been shocked, though perhaps not with the same numbing quality as Mirio. He'd gotten a message from Aizawa-sensei within hours, and a message from Midoriya-san to whom he hadn't spoken in years, and phone calls from Neijire and Tamaki – all of them telling him the same things. The same awful things which clanged between the walls of his skull with an animal rage.

Stay calm.

Stay calm.

_It wasn't his fault._

Stay calm.

But how could he stay calm when Eri had been right there? Right there: eyes the colour of apples; lips quivering in new terror. And how beautiful she'd been! How grown-up and beautiful! As though the child in Mirio's memory hadn't ever existed – indeed, that child seemed to waver and fade with the iridescent quality of spirit-drunk dreams. She withered, she faltered, and she was replaced with the lingering silhouette of a woman. One tall and willowy, breezing through the half-conscious states of Mirio's sleeplessness and intoxication in an ethereal glaze. The prickle of her cheeks' shape in his palms. The simmering emotion like acid in his throat.

She'd been stolen from him once. By _that man_. Overhaul, in the plague mask and the bloody-black hands. She'd been stolen from him once more, now by a face Mirio didn't know. A face he couldn't place no matter how he ripped through the recesses of memory.

Breathing hard, certain his legs were about to cave, Mirio leaned his hands against the windowsill and shuddered. His phone was still and silent in his pocket – there was no use checking it again, there would be no new notifications since the last time.

The air whipped humid against his face. The alcohol webbed itself through his veins. For a long time, Mirio stood helpless and limp until–

A ring! Shrill and clear. Mirio thrust a quivering hand into his pocket and, with a jerking quickness, brought it to his ear. "Sir! Sir, do you have any news?"

Silence greeted him across the line, one tight and tentative, making his ribs turn in on themselves and stab through his lungs. He could barely venture to breathe, struck suddenly by a horrifying sense of foreboding. Holding the phone to his ear with harsh force, he twisted his head upon his shoulders to find a place to sit down – though as things stood, to simply fall backwards into the ground and to let it consume him whole seemed an appetizing option. Overcome, he leaned more deeply against the windowsill.

"Sir?"

Then.

There came a thin, fragile voice like the chime of an angel. _'Lemillion-san?'_

Breath knocked itself from his lungs. Mirio could hardly choke out the syllable, the sound, the stress as it formed upon his tongue in bitter sweetness. God, she sounded so strange. It made him feel so strange to hear her like this – had he really expected her to call? No, he couldn't have. Not if he found himself stumbling, flailing clumsily for the safety of his futon as he willed her name from his heart, the weight he'd carried as a not-so-secret, agonizing secret for so long.

"Eri-chan?" he mustered at last, lowering himself in an unending descent towards the futon. "Oh my god, Eri, is that you?"

* * *

As it happened, Eri was allowed one phone call a week on Chrono's cell. To Russia. To Anya-chan. To the only woman – really, the only person – she'd ever gotten to call a friend. And though at first it had been dictated that Eri could only speak under Chrono's listening ear or with Kai at her side, nowadays it was much easier to slip away into the soundproofed sanctuary and prison of their bedroom for a more private conversation.

All she had to tell them was that she needed to ask Anya a question about the female body.

Chrono and Kai left her alone quite willingly then.

And it was never exactly a lie because Eri did ask questions about the female body – her female body. How it grew sicker and more terrified with each passing day.

How her insides seemed to tear themselves apart in hatred whenever Kai came anywhere near her, though she could do nothing to flee.

Why it was that at the age of twenty – at least, that's how old Kai and Chrono told her she was – her bones felt hollow like paper and her heart held the same thirst for life as a corpse.

Sometimes, Eri would cry over the phone. Miserable, painful sobs ripping themselves from her chest, and Anya-chan would tell her again all the tricks to making it through another soul-destroying episode of Kai's hips between her legs and Kai's lips on her skin in places Eri didn't want his lips to be and Kai reminding her in hot, wet, breathy moans that she was his, only his.

Just look up. Look up and count the cracks on the roof. Pretend that Kai wasn't really Kai, and she wasn't really Eri, and that the nauseating explosions inside of her stomach weren't pain but were instead the fluttering, burning, exciting pleasures she'd read about in books.

Eri had learned to read in Russia, both in Russian and Japanese. It had been a liberty granted to her like a small candy: to read, but not to write. The family (they called themselves a family even though Eri knew they weren't) they'd lived with had gifted her a copy of _Anna Karenina_. Anya-chan, when Eri had grown into a teenage body, had snuck her books in which the men and women did things she hadn't understood. Things strange and tender, like magnifying the sweetness of eating a fruit. Finding in skin the endless excitement of something similar to pain but… not pain.

Besides books though (and, of course, besides watching the Russian men and the Russian women they'd lived with manhandle each other) Anya-chan had been Eri's primary source of education for the things which otherwise made Chrono cringe. And so Anya had remained, a sliver of the normality, the freedom, the womanhood which should not have seemed so vastly foreign.

Eri held the phone in her hand, legs crossed beneath her upon the bed.

However, she didn't so much as look for Anya's number. Not this time.

Instead, she held in her quivering fingers the card – Togata Mirio's card – and gazed at it for a long time with a confused sense of fear and longing.

She'd managed to fit herself away like this so many times before and it had never felt wrong. Hiding had never felt wrong. But now, as Eri hesitated over the digits upon the card, dialing them in with a heavy slowness, she could not help but be absolutely terrified. Kai could walk in at any moment. She could forget to erase the number, or say something compromising. With this, she could send everything spiraling back into the chaos which had left Lemillion dead in her mind for years.

Eventualities presented themselves like items up for auction; and before them, Eri was but a helpless watcher.

Still, she had to know. Or perhaps she did already know. In which case, she had to hear his voice again. Just one more time, for the way it made her pulse run smooth.

Eri entered the number. She dialed.

And within moments, a breathless slur of a voice answered in a stunning string of words straight out of Eri's nightmares. '_Sir! Sir, do you have any news?' _A pause, overflowing. Eri's mind went blank. '_Sir?'_

"Lemillion-san?" His name still felt so unreal. Oh, but no, that wasn't his name. His name was Mirio and for a long time, he was quiet.

'_Eri-chan? Oh my god, Eri, is that you?'_

"Yes," Eri whispered, and a long-closed bloom peeked itself out from her heart. Tears she hadn't realised were welling began a messy descent down her cheeks. She stuttered against them, the sound wet and stupid. "Yes, yes, it's me. Hi. I– I'm sorry. I don't know why… what I'm doing…"

'_I can't believe it. I can't believe it! This is… I thought…' _Lemillion – Mirio – made a short sound like a gasp, a laugh. '_It's so good to hear you. Your voice. There's so much – so, so much I've wanted to say to you._'

Why did it feel so calm? So soft and tender like everything once lost falling back into place, coming back to Eri in slow throbs like heartbeats. Her grasp on the phone tightened while her free hand closed into a limp fist in her lap. Words dammed themselves up in a battle to escape her, crowding in her throat into her ribcage and lungs until all the things she too wanted to say began to suffocate her. He was still a ghost in her mind. Lemillion-san: a voice from beyond the grave. Bringing with him all the relief and terror. All the awful, inevitable grief.

Now was not the time to be crying. Her soul should not have wrenched itself from her body and flung itself about as it did just then. But Eri could not help the whimper that escaped her, overcome as she was by the tremendous turmoil of emotion both good and bad. Something stabbed at her deep inside as she heaved a sighing breath. Everything smoldered before her vision behind the silvery blur of tears she willed not to break. "Lemillion-san–"

'_No, please, Eri-chan,_' he said, sounding happy. Did he smile like he did all those years ago? '_Please call me Mirio._'

Until that moment, she hadn't spoken it aloud. Mi-Ri-O. Abstract and removed, now suddenly carrying all the weight in the world. All the hope which had never existed in Eri's vocabulary. All the regret which she lived upon like daily bread. "Mirio," she murmured, and buried the syllables inside of her. Into her mind, into her heart like a prayer. Then she gasped against a sob. "_Mirio_. I'm sorry."

'_Oh! Don't be sorry… You couldn't have known my name before my now.'_

"No," Eri muttered. "That's not–" A shudder came over her, and for a moment she thought perhaps she would pass out. "I thought you were dead."

She couldn't see him, but the air seemed to change.

'_Did Overhaul tell you that?' _

Eri said nothing. Only touching her quaking fingertips to her lips. Only banishing the sordid image of that body – the blood as red as his cape upon her shoulders, the blonde head dangling and drained. And the smile that never faltered, the smile that never failed as he'd looked her straight in the eye. Blue eyes like skies and oceans, blue eyes of all the world meeting her red ones. Red like his blood. Red like everybody's blood spilled because of her.

'_Where are you, Eri-chan?_' Mirio questioned softly. '_Tell me where you are. I have to see you._'

"You can't."

'_Are you– I mean, are you still in danger?' _he was whispering now, and sounded odd. Off-balance. '_Overhaul… Is he still–'_

"No," Eri said, too quick to be convincing, she thought. "It's not like that. It's just…" Eventualities. Eventualities coated in skin and stained in blood. "It's just that now isn't… umm… not a good time. It's not a good time now."

'_Please, Eri-chan,' _Mirio breathed. '_I can't let you go again. I'll find you. I promise I'll–'_

"I'll come to you."

What was she doing?

When he spoke again, he too sounded rattled. '_You can?' _

"Yes," Eri choked. "Just not tonight. Not tomorrow either, but the night after – it'll be late though." Every inch of her body beat against her. The cold air clawed down her skin in new fierceness; the walls closed in around her. But most of all, her mind. Her mind created images anew of heroes storming in from the roofs and windows, and of all of them being ripped to shreds. What was she doing? "Promise you won't try and find me. Just… give me until then… the night after tomorrow. I'll – tell you everything."

No, she wouldn't. But she'd go to him. The opportunity played itself out before her in golden, sky-eyed promise.

"Promise me."

He hesitated, but at last he promised and told her the name of a hotel. A hotel Eri knew. A hotel mere streets away. Everything inside of her fluttered.

"Thank you, Mirio-san–"

'_Just Mirio._'

"Mirio." Just Mirio. Mi-Ri-O. Daydreams. Clouds in blue, blue, sky-blue eyes. Suddenly shattering. "Don't use this number. Ever."

And in a rush back to reality, back to the chemical-and-sex-and-perfume-scented bedroom with sterilized bedsheets and a dressing table full of pretty, Russian things, Eri hung up. She shut for the moment the door now unlocked, and reeled against the giddy numbness which overtook her. She'd just done something stupid. So stupid! But oh, did it feel like ecstasy. With the sense of floating, she fell back onto the pillows. She held her breath so as to not catch the sneaking scents of Kai. She closed her eyes and replayed, replayed, replayed the sound of his voice. Lemillion. Mirio. His voice and the ghosting smile which before had haunted but now thrilled her.

The fantasy was fleeting though. In a scurry, she rushed to delete the number's existence from Chrono's phone. Double and triple checking. Hoping, praying, pleading that Chrono trusted her enough not to go digging. Then, fingers still shaking, breath still hitching vilely and deliciously in her throat, Eri called Anya-chan as she was supposed to.


	5. iv

iv.

Everything about the hours that followed were torture in its purest variety. Nighteye called with no news – and by some sense of the instinctual, Mirio didn't tell him about Eri. About the phone call and the visit to come. He swallowed down upon his bliss and terror with a numb jolt of exhaustion, and didn't get a wink of sleep after hanging up. Tossing. Turning. Scrambling up from the futon to vomit; only to retch harshly and fruitlessly while his insides burned in acidic turmoil.

He chewed through the next days' meetings in a restless distraction. He didn't eat. Couldn't think. Though he put up a good enough façade, managing to seal deals with a smile which pulled painfully at his lips' corners, he thought only of Eri and counted the hours, minutes, seconds until he would see her.

Late, she'd said. She'd be at his hotel room late. And what was late? Ten p.m.? Midnight? The nauseous, dizzy stupor didn't fade: not a hangover but a hideous anticipation which kept Mirio swimming against the current of his delicately established routine.

He may as well have cancelled all his week's business. Nighteye, in gentle understanding, had given him permission to do so. Had even encouraged it.

But Mirio had reasoned that the distraction would be good (would make time tick by more smoothly).

How wrong he'd been.

So when at last the evening arrived in pastel hues of purple fading to dark blue fading to black, Mirio could not allow himself the indulgence of sitting still. For a long time – hours, perhaps – he paced the hotel room in an expectant daze. Jumping at the most innocent of noises – muffled footsteps in the hallway, a bird taking off in flapping panic outside the window. Nudging the furniture. Adjusting his hair in the mirror, senses attuned to the spontaneous appearance of a wrinkle or grey hair. And for the first time in years, Mirio became overtly aware of how old he looked. Age happened. He knew he was not immune. But with a sinking horror, he considered how strange it would seem for Eri to see him like this.

Would she pick out the dull circles beneath his eyes like plums from branches?

Would she find in his smile the weighed, humdrum quality of a man not a hero?

She'd thought he was dead. Perhaps that would be how she'd remembered him all these years – sunken and cold and very, very dead. The thought struck a blade through Mirio's heart, and he wondered – did he have any life left in him to make her remember otherwise?

He changed his clothes twice. He ordered a platter of cold foods and left them waiting upon the table by the TV.

He watched the figure skating semi-finals, but paid no heed to the glittering images that flashed before him. He lay in a stiff, impatient line upon the futon. And as the clock continued to tick, and tick and tick and tickticktick, Mirio was overcome with the terrible fear that she wouldn't arrive. Perhaps in a desperate fever, he'd only dreamed their phone call. A cruel trick. A shattering illusion conjured by the aching mind.

But no, there was still the number with which she'd called him. It glared bright and tempting out from the cellphone screen.

What if? What if she didn't come?

Mirio got a call from the reception desk at eleven p.m.

The voice over the line was irritated, sounding tired and harsh as Mirio was informed he had a visitor – a _visitor_, the reception-desk-voice said, and with such an undertone which could only have been to remind Mirio that prostitutes and parties were strictly forbidden in the hotel. But oh! Yes! Yes, he'd been expecting her, the visitor, and the reception-desk-voice muttered touchily that she would be up shortly.

The line cracked downwards into black silence. And Mirio could have screamed for all the relief and all the exhilaration.

He waited in the doorway with his eyes set hard upon the end of the corridor. The gloomy, golden-glowing corridor which stretched itself further outwards into separating space.

And from around its corner, like a mist-clad fairy in a stale sunset, she appeared at last. Long, white sleeves over long, white arms. Long, white hair down her long, white neck. Eri froze there, mere paces away, and swayed uncertainly in the dull light. She looked at Mirio and Mirio looked at her, both of them speechless and upon the brink of something earth-shattering. Mirio sensed it. The way time stopped with the same skidding plunge as his heart. The way everything before and behind them fell into a tight, terrible emptiness. She felt it too. Perhaps more so, for even so far away – she was so close! – Mirio could see her tremble.

"I– I'm sorry it's so late," Eri said quietly, remaining rooted at the end of the hallway.

Hesitantly, slowly – for fear of scaring her off – Mirio went towards her. "That's okay. Really. I was completely awake."

Not entirely untrue. However, its okay-ness had more to do with the fact that the moment had lost any sense of time or place. It was neither late nor early, neither here nor there. There was only Eri. Eri, not Eri, not the one who'd haunted Mirio all these years. She stared at him, lips parted to speak but still saying nothing, and looked so wrong in her confusion and shock it was almost heartbreaking, almost beautiful in the way of art.

"Do you, umm, want to… come in, Eri-chan? To my hotel room, I mean. I have–"

"Yes," Eri said in a gasp. Her accent strange and bounding like cursive. "I want to come in."

Trying to hide from the imposing stillness of the hallway was futile though. Even on the sitting cushions, beneath the brighter illumination of the room, there still lay between them a chasm of space and memory.

They were strangers whose paths had once crashed violently in a jumble of good intentions and failure. They were strangers whose paths had gone separate ways once again, though for years Mirio had fought against it. And by the hollow rips in their flimsy bond, he found himself disappointed. This was no reunion. After all that had come to pass, this was not a moment to be inscribed in poems of romance or tragedy. No – after everything, this was meant to be an apology. Simply that.

An apology without explanation, because there could be no explaining why he'd failed her. Why he hadn't been strong enough to be the hero she'd needed.

An apology without absolution, because there was no such thing in the universe for Mirio after he'd let her go.

Mirio bowed his head, dismayed by the untouched selection of food between them and weak under the dewy, glazed look on Eri's face. "This is strange, isn't it?" he murmured, feeling false and diabolical as he tried to smile. "Like a dream."

"Yes," Eri just about whispered, dropping her eyes from him. "A dream."

Did she hate Mirio as much as he hated himself?

"Please help yourself if you'd like something to eat!" Forced cheer. "The food here is delicious." Small talk.

Eri's face wilted into a tight look of sadness. "I'm sorry to have made you go through all of this, Lemill– Mirio-san. I've already eaten dinner."

"No, no. Don't be sorry! I just thought…" What had he thought? He'd thought with his heart, that's what he'd thought, and it amounted to idiocy. "Something to drink maybe?"

"Umm… I don't think– No. No, thank you, Mirio-san."

"Right. Okay. That's totally fine."

Silence again. Eri's back remained upright, her hands tight in her lap like shivering pearls. Everything about her was polite and polished, and simmering with an unreadable emotion which dared not escape. The question blared between the walls of Mirio's skull without the promise of being turned to words: Where did Overhaul fit in in all of this? He did his best to quell the swirling, seething swell inside of him – now was not the time for Overhaul. There was only Eri, and all the things she deserved being given to her too late.

Shuffling, curling his own hands into fists and flattening them again, Mirio heaved a stuttering breath. "Eri-chan. I need to tell you–"

She crumbled. And under the distinct weight of the moment, she began to cry.

"Eri!"

"I can't do this."

In a sweeping motion, the material of her skirt dancing about her legs in pale blue airs, she jumped up and circled around the table. Around Mirio. For the door. But he was up too, too soon for her to get far, and before he could stop himself his hand was around hers. She didn't fight him, instead looking back in a quiet plead of tears and soundless gasps.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!" Mirio choked out. "I couldn't save you." Not thinking about the words, finding no strength to make them stop. "I couldn't keep you safe. All I wanted was for you to be safe!" And then he too, with a spine-breaking weight upon his shoulders, began to weep. He couldn't smile for her this time. What had it gotten her before? He couldn't smile for her this time because to do so would be a betrayal. He had no right. Not when she trembled and he trembled and all the immensity of his weakness set itself against her beautiful, terrified face. "I couldn't keep my promise to you."

"No…" he heard her murmur. "_No_, Mirio-san."

"I'm so sorry."

"It was all my fault."

"No, Eri." His turn to object. "Nothing– nothing was ever your fault! _Ever_."

A merciful touch of her fingers to his cheek. And such perfect fingers they were, long and white and with all the same gentleness as years before. When had she come so close? Why wouldn't the tears, the suffocating ache they brought with them, stop? Something slipped. Something broke, and for sacred seconds the two of them were separated from the unwritten rules of decency and dissociation. The years crashed down, no longer so empty and no longer so silent.

Mirio pulled her into him, and Eri buried her face into his neck. Still wet. Still warm. And for a long time, they stayed like that: holding each other with the ghosting sense that they'd been there before. Her in his arms, held close and safe. He, for a moment, carrying what he could only describe as the entire universe in the dangling circumference of his grasp.

She was clouded in a potent scent of soap. Something chemical and clean, a harsh overtone to the blossom of lotus flowers.

She still felt so tiny alongside him.

Both of them sighed, and in its falling sound there opened up before them the beginning of something terribly confused. Their old selves shed, the strangeness of the new falling about them in a concealing curtain.

It was hard to believe that it all lasted mere minutes, that within a handful of clock ticks – tickticktick – they were back at the table. Still stuttering against tears, but with a certain loose relief which made it easier to smile. Easier to talk. Neither of them ate. They didn't touch again, though Eri's shape had bored itself into Mirio's memory like a million hot pinpricks. She asked him questions. Simple, easy questions about what he did, and where he lived, and how old he was. Thirty had never seemed like such a grey number compared to twenty.

Mirio couldn't believe she was twenty.

She didn't tell him anything about herself apart from her age though, and to expect her to do so now seemed unfair somehow – even though the questions loomed over them, unseen but distinct as glass. However, she was here. Uneasy, and tending to flinch at sudden movements, but here. She was okay, and for the moment Mirio accepted it as enough.

So he answered her questions tenderly. Gently. He showed her photos in his phone of the places he'd been and the people he knew. "These guys are Tamaki and Neijire," he told her. "We all knew each other in high school, and they got married after graduating."

"_Married_," Eri murmured, almost in a trance as she gazed stiffly at the image. Then she hummed. "She's very beautiful."

"And they have two beautiful kids. Look, here they are." Mirio grinned proudly, though the smile didn't quite reach his heart. "I'm their godfather."

"What's a godfather?"

"Oh… Well it's… actually, I don't know. I suppose it's just a nice title."

Charmed, Eri took the phone and stared at the photo of Neijire and Tamaki's daughters for a long time. A long, long time, and after a while lifted her fingers to stroke at the screen.

Something in the motion was shattering. Mirio tilted his head at her, and tried hard to think of something to say. "Do you have anyone special in your life, Eri-chan?"

"A husband."

"Oh!" Mirio cried falsely. "That's wonderful! Was it the man you were with at the market?"

She drew a harsh breath. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, though it was hard to say if they were new or simply the remnants from before. "No," she said, and handed Mirio his phone back. "That was his… brother." Then she stood once again, more gingerly this time, and avoided meeting Mirio's eye. His heart sank for the umpteenth time that evening – the photo of the girls had upset her. "I should go now."

And feebly, Mirio only nodded. "Okay."

The reception desk on the bottom floor now stood dark and abandoned. The night outside was still, hushed and waiting to consume Eri in its obscurity. She didn't want Mirio to walk her home; and though he couldn't bear to let her go yet, he didn't argue. He couldn't ask too much. She'd come and he'd done what he needed to, although it didn't seem like enough. He still owed her the world, and he couldn't possibly give that to her in the space of an hour and a wept apology.

In the border of the doorway, they paused. Hesitated. The air was hung heavy with unspoken somethings, and Eri – more specter than human, too aglow in the halfway light of the hotel and the star-speckled darkness for Mirio to look away – seemed about to speak. God, he wanted to hold her again. He wanted to feel her heartbeat align with his. Nothing suspect. Nothing of the sort. Only the simplicity of his arms cradling her in a mock attempt at the safety he wished for her. All the warmth. All the tenderness. Like all those years ago.

With a stunning grace, Eri reached out for him and clasped his hand in both her own. "I want to see you again, Mirio-san," she said, almost desperate. "Please let me see you again."

"Come tomorrow," he replied, too eager.

Eri shook her head. "Next week. The same night and time."

"But–"

She was on her toes. Her lips, cold and soft, were to his cheek in a fairy-light touch of skin to skin. And then she was gone from him in a blurry grace of doe-limbed rushing and a fluttering skirt. White against the black. Stealing Mirio's heartbeats with her into the night like a sylph running through myth. He watched her, fingertips lifted to graze the place her lips had been, and imagined a cold scrape down the entirety of his spine despite the sweat which marred his nape and brow. That moment, that very second, he began to count the hours once more.


	6. v

v.

She'd only done something like this once before. Once. A long time ago… and that had ended with heroes on their doorstep and blood on her hands.

Now however, the night was quiet around her as she ran. Still and cool as crystal, tears swiping at her cheeks in an electrified numbness. Smooth and dark as a frozen ocean, the sound of waves lapping gently from the harbor. Though Eri wound herself through familiar streets, back toward the chokehold of Kai's arms, she felt for the first time a weightless, guiltless liberation. It shivered through her veins with the taste of salty air; prickled across her skin with the lingering weight of Mirio's arms, how they'd held her so safe and soft.

For the first time, Eri felt a stir of emotion so much more than simply fear – though of course, it continued to claw down her back. Fear, slinking: a muscled, black animal bored and hungry, warning her off with hissed alarms and snarling threats.

Eventualities. There were so many eventualities, and it had felt so wrong to see him. Mirio. To allow herself to sink into the foreign, hard shape of his chest which somehow seemed more familiar to her than home. So wrong. But so wonderful. It made Eri's heart unfurl in a shivering flutter to think of it. Lemillion, Mirio, had been so wonderful despite how his face had worn itself with pale lines and a harried exhaustion. Despite how his smile was different, his hands less steady than before.

Climbing through the kitchen window, propped open just as she'd left it, Eri held her breath in an attempt to preserve the illusion of Mirio's smell: a minty aftershave, something sweet underneath.

Tip-toeing along the corridors, down the long swoop of stairs, Eri resisted the crash of fear in her gut with thoughts of how he'd looked at her – like she was something beautiful, something precious. A flower. A star, or all the stars at once, when all Eri had ever felt was that she was the darkness in between.

No light outlined the door to Chrono's study as she passed it. All was dark through the basement hallways. Nothing stirred. Nothing recognised her as she snuck guilty and not-so-guilty through the shadows.

And upon reaching the washroom undisturbed, Eri sank into herself with a restrained relief. Chrono hadn't noticed she was gone. And Kai – Kai wasn't home yet, otherwise… No. Eri shook her head, banishing the thought and relishing, at least for the moment, the small rush of victory through her bones. It was frightening how addictive it felt. How every inch of her quivered to do it again. Begging. Longing. The vast, lonely night outside having been hers and hers alone – she'd breathed it in without anyone breathing down her neck, she'd looked it in the eye with nothing to watch her do it.

She wanted to feel that way again. Soon – and it would be soon, only a week away, and like a starstruck teenager Eri began to calculate the hours until she would see Mirio again.

She did so while she stripped herself naked in the washroom: twenty four hours multiplied by seven days. She did so while she scrubbed her skin clean of Mirio's smell and touch; she didn't regret removing him like this, because already he was imprinted upon her mind with the smoldering weight of an iron brand.

Climbing herself into the white pajamas, Eri tried but failed to quell the floundering speed of her pulse. Slipping herself into the fresh sheets of the bed, she willed sleep to come but instead remained wide awake and continuing to count, count, count how long it would be before she could repeat this night.

She heaved a sharp breath, and she smiled.

Her head on the pillow, her hand to her heart – Eri smiled a tight, close-to-painful smile as though she didn't know this would end terribly. Time passed her by like this, an unheard clock ticking out of ticks, and she held Mirio's face between her temples and the fresh, free breath of air in her ribcage.

But it couldn't last. Of course it couldn't.

Everything receded with a crash as the bedroom door softly shrieked open and closed again. That crushing, metallic sound of foreboding through the chemical-stained darkness, and by an electric sense of instinct Eri shot up to sit.

Was it that time already? She held the sheets to her throat. Was he home early? She lamented the wash of dread which replaced the night's splendor. And tensing all throughout herself, she listened to the familiar tap of feet along the floor. Coming close. Coming close, the black animal rearing itself inside of her once again as the golden eyes she couldn't see but could feel smoldered across her flesh like a furnace–

"Eri," Kai said, soft and severe. "You're awake."

There came the sharp smell of his soap and aftershave, something wet and pungent as he seated himself carefully on the edge of the bed. Eri imagined dews of damp in his hair and nape from the shower he must have just taken, and made herself almost gag. She tried to shrink into the pillows, to engrave herself into the headboard, but with each miniscule shift of her limbs Kai came closer still. A presence whose weight bore greater suffocating power than the shadows themselves.

"I couldn't sleep," she told him, and drew some fleeting comfort from the fact that it wasn't a lie. He hummed throatily, a cat's purr, and Eri pulled the sheet further against herself in a futile defense against nothing.

"Perhaps you should take some of your pills."

"No," Eri objected quietly. "No, I was just… _Just_…" She had to stop talking. He'd suspect something. "How was your meeting?"

There came a sound like a sigh, and the mattress groaned in muted relief as Kai stood once again.

"A waste of time," he said, his silhouette prowling in odd shapes as he paced. He took off his shirt and discarded it to the side so that Eri could glimpse a shape both muscular and frightening through the darkness. She squirmed. She shivered. She shuffled onto the cliff-face edge of the mattress so that half of her was practically balanced in shadowed space. Kai slipped himself into the other side of the bed, and said, "I'm considering sending Chrono next week in my stead."

Eri's heart plunged. The bright image of Mirio crackled across her vision. "Oh."

"What did you do this evening?"

"Umm… I painted for a while after dinner."

"And?"

"And I read."

"Do you still have enough books to keep yourself busy?"

Somehow, Eri couldn't bring herself to say that she had more books around the house than she knew what to do with. "I might need a new one soon."

Another hum. "We'll go in the morning then. But you should sleep now." In slinking slowness, a familiar five-fingered weight, Kai's hand was against her hip. Pulling lazily, making Eri taste the illusion of blood upon her tongue as he murmured, "Come here."

Without a choice, without the strength to hold herself at the mattress's edge any longer, Eri twisted herself along the bed into Kai's arms. The hard warmth of his skin oozed across her back. She could feel the muted graze of his breath through the bedtime mask down her nape. This was the way things were now. After so many years of being handled by him like a tool or toy, Eri should not have shuddered nauseously to have had him so close. Even if he held her gently like this, his touch still wasn't kind – the way his fingers stroked at her throat; how his heartbeat aligned itself with hers in a mocking throb. It wasn't like the way Mirio had held her just hours before.

How long had it been since Kai had touched her for something more than her quirk? Eri couldn't remember.

She couldn't remember when he'd told her to stop calling him Overhaul, or when she'd realised that he'd started to leave his fingers lingering for just a little longer than usual in the small of her back. She hadn't known why it was that his eyes had started to darken in stormy glows whenever he looked at her, or what it had meant when he'd started to graze her arms with his fingertips as though he were running them down porcelain. Trembling. Testing.

Those same fingers ran themselves over hers now, but paused in their wanderings. "Where's your ring?" Kai questioned.

Eri swallowed. "I forgot to put it back on after my bath. It's in my jewelry box."

"Go put it on."

Suddenly sore in inexplicable stiffness, Eri slipped herself from the bed and made for the dressing table. She opened the box, the shrill hollowness of Swan Lake tinkling into the morning's darkness – a haunted accompaniment for haunted nights.

Nights such as the first time Kai (back then, still Overhaul) had come into Eri's bedroom back in Russia (the windows barred, the door hung with several locks to which only he had the key). He'd opened the music box for reasons Eri still couldn't understand. Then he'd snaked the clothing from her body. He'd pulled his mask down from his mouth and kissed her neck. And because he'd touched her so many times before, because that time had only been different because she'd been naked and he'd been naked and there was no one else around to see, Eri had done what she'd always done and shut her mouth. She'd shut her mouth and listened to a ghostly ballet suite while what had been done was done.

It had felt like she would be sick onto the pillows when he'd put his fingers between her legs. And it had felt like her insides were being torn to shreds every time he'd moved. But still, Eri had stayed quiet until he left in a breathless, trudging relief. Swan Lake echoing out in tinny struggle.

No one batted an eye when she became his wife some months later. Not even Eri herself.

And no one found it strange that their story was nothing like the romance novels. Not even Eri herself.

And Eri only assumed that sex and power were exactly the same thing, and that it was only natural that Kai wanted her for both.

Taking her ring and shutting the music box with a special hatred, Eri returned to bed and climbed herself back alongside Kai. He brushed his fingertips through her hair. He held her wrists as though to sleep was to be imprisoned, his own fingers ringless in a reminder that Eri was his and he not hers. That she was only something which could 'belong' to somebody else and not somebody who could have anything 'belong' to her.

In the few remaining hours of darkness, Eri tripped between suffocated waking and a shallow unconsciousness – and through it all, she tried to pretend that Kai's arms around her were not Kai's at all, but Mirio's.

* * *

**A/N: Next chapter's going to be something a little (a lot) more lighthearted. Not that I really think anything in this sort of situation could be called lighthearted as such, but hey - Eri's got to have survived thirteen years of Overhaul's shittiness somehow... :/ **

**Follows, favourites and reviews (of the constructive sort) are always appreciated. xx**


	7. vi

vi.

For reasons Eri loathed, sugar was a rare treat in their house. Her tea was always bitter – a too-strong green, made no more palatable by the dash of honey she was permitted – and on the lonely morning in the middle of the week she was allowed to drink coffee (the morning after her _procedures_, when she was often too weak to get out of bed and when Kai was at his nicest) Eri had it only with a sliver of cream.

But there were days. Days when Chrono would wink at her mischievously, placing a mug rather than a tea cup in front of her with a conspiratorial 'ssh'. Days when Kai didn't eat breakfast with them because he'd locked himself in his study all through the night and so was either asleep at his desk or still working in a frenzy. Those days, Eri and Chrono drank hot chocolate. Sometimes, if Chrono was feeling particularly generous or lucky, there would even be a white puff of marshmallows bouncing on top.

Today was one such day, and the delicious shock of sweetness could not have soothed Eri's stomach more.

She left a mini-marshmallow lingering against her tongue, the cloudy fluff melting richly, and tapped her fingers against the shell of the mug. There were apple slices on her side plate – she herself rarely ate anything more for breakfast – and rain tapping lightly on the window in misty gloom.

Kai's seat at the dining table being empty made mornings much easier. Or not easier, as such, but at least without him there Eri could swallow down upon her food without such a stuttering struggle.

Chrono read a newspaper with bored eyes while the maids washed dishes around the corner in a deaf, dumb stupor.

Eri's own book lay next to her plate, though she could muster no focus nor desire to open it. Her mind wandered. Her mind counted. Chrono would give her his phone that evening, and then she would cocoon herself in the secret safety of her bedroom and call Mirio. The promise of it bloomed beautiful before her like a poisonous flower. The anticipation left her dizzy and breathless, a shake about her fingers which refused to be quelled by food or distraction.

Sipping from her hot chocolate – oh, glorious sugar upon her tongue! – Eri steeled herself in an attempt not to sound too curious. "Kurono-san," she began quietly.

"Mmm?"

"Did Kai talk to you about his meeting this week?"

"He mentioned it."

Eri nodded, measuring her tone and next words with care. "Are you going to go?" she asked. "I'm just wondering. You know. In case I should–"

"As far as I know," Chrono interrupted gently, placing down his newspaper and blinking at Eri with no glimmer of suspicion, "Overhaul's planning on going himself. You know how he is."

The excited relief threatened to bubble over like champagne, and Eri had to conceal herself behind the rim of her mug. The promise bloomed wider: she'd phone Mirio that night before phoning Anya-chan; she'd see him but two sleeps after. It would have to be the last time, Eri reminded herself – only one more brilliant indulgence to convince herself that it was indeed all real. That he was real. It would be the last time, reluctant though she may have been to let it be so.

But still, the butterflies in her ribcage did nothing to stop their vibrant flurry. Her heart refused to be convinced that this wasn't only the beginning. The beginning of what? It made Eri sick to think about – but a good sick. A sweet sick, like a syrupy ripple. Would she be able to let Mirio go now that she knew his blood wasn't on her hands? More than that – would he be willing to let her go now that he'd found her again?

Leaning in, Chrono cocked his head. It was hard to say with the mask over his mouth, but there was an inkling of a smile in his eyes. "Would you like him to skip the meeting this week, Eri-chan?"

"No."

"He wouldn't mind if you asked him. If you wanted–"

"No," Eri insisted with softness enough to disguise her horror. "I was really, really just wondering."

Chrono's expressions weren't as easy to read as Kai's. Still, Eri recognised in the pale wrinkles a disappointed downturn like a white candle melting. Subtle. But distinct. As most things tended to be in their confused little household: patterns and peculiarities which would have been indecipherable were it not for the _years _Eri had spent picking them out like threads from a blanket.

And wanting as Eri did for Chrono not to frown because of her, she slumped slightly in her seat. She waited – waited for Chrono to say something more. About Kai. About her and Kai. Anything to which she could have obliged gently to see the expression on Chrono's face soften. She would have taken her darling husband his breakfast: that gross green juice with all the accompanying multitude of vitamins like coloured candies. She would have kissed her darling husband good morning; with mock tenderness on the cheek, with false sweetness on the lips, and with Chrono there to see, as though they were a picture of domestic bliss rather than Eri's own personal source of inspiration for when she needed to make herself vomit.

For Chrono, Eri would have done these things. Grudgingly. But she would have done them. Because even though she'd never been able to wrap her head around it, Chrono seemed to find endless fulfillment in seeing Kai and Eri act as though they were actually married – like it was all red roses and not red blood.

Maybe he was compensating for what Eri herself didn't feel.

Despite all of this though, Chrono only shrugged. His eyes glinted upwards once again with a smile of marshmallow softness, equally as white in the flows of grey light through the window (the window Eri had snuck through like a thief in the night!), and he reached his hand over the table to tap the rim of Eri's mug. "He shouldn't be coming out for another while still." He was talking about Kai. "Want another cup of hot chocolate?"

Eri gasped. With delight. With still more relief. "With marshmallows!"

"Oh, yes. Naturally," Chrono grinned, rising from his chair and taking both their mugs. "I also bought you a treat from the market this week, since we didn't get to have our taiyaki _again. _Our little secret, of course."

Eri had avoided their last trip to the market with claims and qualms that she'd been light-headed. Chrono had suggested she was still reeling from their last session of procedures. Kai had given her pills she hadn't needed, though light-headed she'd certainly been. Light-headed and whoozy and fluttering with the thought and fear of running into Mirio again.

Nodding solemnly and with something of a restrained smile, Eri whispered in conspiring thrill, "Our secret."

* * *

Mirio gazed wistfully at the gemstone collage of flowers, bundled and brilliant in baskets and tubs both outside and within the store.

He'd been there for a long time already. Too long, quite frankly, floating about in a floral-scented rapture at the thought of seeing Eri again. Finding her in every petal and bud. _Look at this_! A white dahlia like the curling bloom of her hair. _And look at this_! A ranunculus in hues of crimson nearly as deep as those of her eyes. Swooning over it all in shameless daydreaming, Mirio tried to imagine his eagerness into a bouquet. Something like jewels spilling out from their box, all shimmering petals of pastel. Or something richer, deeper, in moody glows and fiery brightness.

Mirio hadn't expected her to call again, and hearing her voice the other night had left him reeling upon a high. They hadn't spoken for very long – a few seconds at best; Eri had only wanted to tell him that nothing had changed. She would still be at his hotel room two nights from then (now only hours away!). And he, quite flagrantly, had told her he couldn't wait. He couldn't wait to see her again, indelicate though it may have seemed considering she was… married.

Married! It was a word around which Mirio struggled to wrap his mind.

Had he – this vague and nameless husband – been the one to rescue her from Overhaul? A fine and dashing prince. A hero. Swooping in to save the princess from the dragon. Mirio shook his head and sighed with a thin smile. Did said vague and nameless husband give Eri the world? The stars and sun? Did he give her flowers? Mirio hoped so, though he could not help but foster a vague uneasiness.

Perhaps it was only a silhouette of Nighteye's skepticism rubbing off on him. No, no! Mirio refused to let it be so. He would not let Sir's ever-rational sense get the best of him this time. Even though it sort of did make sense, and it did all seem rather strange, and perhaps Mirio should have been thinking more about what it meant that there continued to be no public records of Eri's existence. That she was not free to see him at holier hours of the evening – or even on just any evening, for that matter. She'd sounded rushed and restless over the phone. She'd still trembled silently in his arms as she had all those years before…

No, no!

Mirio bent down to consider a body of pale chrysanthemums, fondling their faces distractedly.

There would be a place and time for all these considerations, all these questions. However, for now, Mirio couldn't bring himself to quash the anticipation and the delight. He couldn't allow protocol to push Eri away. Not again. No matter how Nighteye might caution him against it.

The little old lady shopkeeper, who'd been looming curiously about the storefront since Mirio's arrival, came to pat him warmly on the shoulder. In an old kimono of greens and lavender, its silk hanging in a near-elegant shapelessness about her tiny frame, she seemed odd. Ethereal in a way, more so with the cobweb-spun cloud of hair which puffed itself about her scrunched and smiling face. "If you'd like something for a sweetheart," she said scratchily, "might I suggest lilacs? Or perhaps some sweetpeas."

"Oh!" Mirio straightened himself, and grinned down at the little old lady with a threatening blush. "No, no! No sweetheart for me. I'm just admiring how pretty these all are."

The lady cooed. "Now, a young man like you without somebody to woo? You must be joking with me."

Mirio chuckled, "I wouldn't exactly call myself a young man, Obasan."

Teasingly, she smacked his shoulder. "Don't tease an old lady."

With continued questioning, the lady convinced Mirio that if there wasn't someone he wanted to buy flowers for (If not a lover – then a mother? A friend?) then he wouldn't have been in a flower shop. Not that he'd really needed convincing, of course. He knew she was right even if he also knew it would have been absurd for him to even consider buying Eri flowers. It would have been absurd. Right? _Right_? Or maybe not, if he bought the right kind of flowers, and on this note the little old lady took the liberty of putting together a tight arrangement of daisies – "For innocence," she explained. "And friendship."

Ten out of ten selling skills.

Like a garden witch, sewing together her floral concoction of symbolism with a wrinkled smile which should not have seemed so youthful as it did, she captured Mirio and held him there.

He watched her through a charmed fascination. How her boney hands with skin like paper twiddled and twisted the flowers with pointed ease. How her muted kimono swished as she bustled about her bushy, colourful counter. They chatted easily like birds on the same branch, and as Mirio grew more confident in his decision he began to point out blooms in clueless requests. What about that one? "Oh yes," the lady would say all too knowingly. "White jasmine will suit this wonderfully." And what about that one? "Oh, of course. White daffodils will be splendid. For new beginnings!"

Only once did she shake her head at Mirio's selection.

"No, no, the hyssop won't do," she tutted with profundity. "Cleanliness has no place in an arrangement like this."

And at the end of it all, Mirio was handed a glowing swell of petals – all white. White like the shape of Eri in his mind. The lady sighed, and in true witchly fashion offered Mirio a generous discount in exchange for something of equal loveliness: that he tell her about the girl for whom such a bouquet was intended. It didn't even take Mirio a moment. Giddy, smiling like a young boy, he did nothing to stop himself.

He told her about the girl. The girl he'd met once before, so many years ago it was almost hard to believe he'd kept count. And though he hadn't expected to ever see her again, everything had conspired for and against him and now he'd found her. Or she'd found him. Or they'd found each other, and she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. And he wanted to know her. And he hoped against all hopeless hope that she'd found happiness beyond anything he could have ever dreamed she'd find.

The old lady pursed her lips at him. She hummed, either thoughtful or incredulous, and then huffed in a way which seemed almost furious though her eyes still smiled. "My boy," she said tenderly. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather go with lilacs?"

* * *

**A/N: Hope everyone enjoyed! I myself would kill a man in exchange for some good flower symbolism in a story... XD **

**Do follow, favourite and review!**


	8. vii

vii.

A yellow vest should not have made Mirio's heart stutter; a loose ponytail and unruly wisps of hair should not have seemed so exquisite. Even so – opening his hotel room door, Mirio beamed at Eri through a gold-tinted elation, finding in the colour of her shirt all the glow of daffodils and in the blotchy pinks of her cheeks all the loveliness of youth.

Were it not for the weight of memory, it could have been so normal: just two people meeting up after years, Eri a grown up girl-next-door and Mirio just a man (an old man… she probably thought he was old) who couldn't keep his eyes off her. Who couldn't stop the smile which made his face ache. And she offered him something of a smile in return, though there was about it a certain restraint as she breezed into the hotel room, a hesitation as she lowered herself onto one of the sitting cushions by the table. But still, she smiled at Mirio and it was gut-wrenchingly wonderful.

The bouquet Mirio had bought smoldered prettily on the table. While he poured them both tea, Eri touched her fingers to the petals as though she were stroking frail porcelain. Her features sparkled, enchanted. Her skin glowed, ghostly pale. She was caressing the face of a daisy when Mirio held out a steaming cup of jasmine for her, and immediately after taking it and bopping her head in a small mimic of a bow, she returned her attention to the flowers.

"Do you like them, Eri-chan?" Mirio asked her.

She nodded sweetly. "Lilies are my favourite. Like this one." Gently, she traced her fingertip over the arching petals of the bouquet's single lily. "We… umm… I used to live in a house with all sorts of lilies growing in the garden. Mostly in pots though."

"That's wonderful," Mirio grinned. He groped for more to say as Eri hummed uncertainly. "Does your husband also like lilies? Did you grow them together?"

Husband. House. Garden. Something in the domestic imagery left a bitter taste in Mirio's throat; perhaps it was only the foreignness of it though, both for Mirio himself – who'd only had one or two serious girlfriends in the past, and otherwise lived in hotelrooms – and for the image of Eri he'd spent many nights building up in his mind. She too seemed taken aback by the suggestion, blinking at him and shaking her head in a surprised slowness like a questioning doe.

She cleared her throat, the sound of it a delicate ripple. "Umm, well, no. No. He – my husband – he doesn't like flowers." A pause. Precarious. "He says they're…" Yet another pause. "He thinks flowers are silly. The house we stayed in was a… friend's. The lilies were theirs."

"Oh." Mirio should not have sounded as sad as he did.

But if Eri's husband thought such a thing, it would have been presumptuous and preposterous for Mirio to give her the bouquet as he'd originally planned. Really, it had been a stupid idea in the first place. But the look on her face as she returned her attention to the white blooms was spectacular, and the way she sighed wistfully – how could anyone _not _want to buy _her _flowers?

Mirio sipped from his tea. Eri did the same. Mirio tried to think of something to say. Eri seemed in no rush to speak.

"How did you and your husband meet?" Any and every question tasted like an intrusion, and before he could swallow his words Eri's face went grey. Mirio floundered against himself internally. "If you don't mind me asking."

"We – _we–_" Eri's fingers went tight around her cup. "We met–"

"I'm sorry if that's too private! We can talk about something else, Eri-chan."

She looked down. "I'm so sorry."

"No, no, Eri-chan, please. It's…" Heart in his throat. Dead weight in his hands. Mirio closed the small space between them by touching his fingers to hers. "It's fine. Let me ask you a different question. Your – well, let me see – oh! Your accent is really interesting. Can you tell me about your accent?"

"My accent?"

"Yeah! It's pretty unusual. Sort of harsh, I guess, but like – in a good way. It's striking."

"Oh," Eri blushed, and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "It's probably the Russian. We lived there for a while. In Russia. And when I say a while, I mean we lived there until about a year ago. So, yes. It's probably the Russian."

"Wow!" Was her husband a Russian then? Did the vague and nameless 'we' refer to her and him, or to her and Overhaul? Was that where Overhaul was: in Russia? "Your Japanese is great for having been gone for so long."

"I had tutors."

"Can you speak Russian too?"

Eri tilted her head to the side, almost teasing, and smiled through a string of foreign words. Foreign words both hard and gorgeous, fascinating in their heaviness, though perhaps it was only because her voice – so thin and gentle – could probably make even the severest of sounds ring beautiful like a bell. Mirio drew a breath more like a gasp, and threw his hands together as though to clap; however, when he asked her what it meant, Eri didn't give an answer.

Instead, she parted her lips in a coy grin, like a little girl mightily pleased with herself while not wanting to show it. She shrugged her shoulders, the hollows behind her collarbones deepening into lush shadows. "Nothing really," she said. "Just something easy. Sort of a greeting." But something in her voice told Mirio she had said something so much more than that.

Mystified, the whole thing as unknown as a fairytale, Mirio found himself falling slowly towards her. "Tell me what else you learned in Russia," he encouraged, and cocooned her fingers more fully in his. Hesitating. Moving closer. Hesitating again as Eri's eyes flickered towards her hands covered by his; and when she made no move to withdraw, when she came closer too with a melting about her previous stiffness, Mirio's heart receded from its squeeze in his skull and gut.

"I learned ballet," Eri said, secretive. "From a lady named Anya. She dances with the Bolshoi – do you know the Bolshoi? You don't? It's a ballet company. And it's a theatre in Moscow. It's really beautiful."

"Mmm? What makes it beautiful?"

"The ballerinas."

"Would you believe me if I told you I used to take ballet lessons too?" Mirio grinned.

And Eri shook her head pointedly, smile widening with an unuttered giggle. "No! I wouldn't believe it. You sit too slouched!"

"Ah man! You caught me! And here I thought I'd be able to cheat my way into making a good impression." Mirio clasped her hands tighter, molding them around the shape of her cup. "I underestimated your people reading skills."

She didn't reply, but made a sound like a satisfied puff and looked away. To the flowers, their reflection luminous in her eyes' deep colour. To her hands held in Mirio's – wholly chaste in spite of the intimacy, making blossomy hues seep into her cheeks despite the affection's platonic softness.

It was wrong though, to hold her hands like this. Right? It must have been. Mirio teetered on knife's edge between guilt and delight and being absolutely terrified of letting her go. Even if the touch of the gesture meant nothing, the solidity of the touch meant everything. She was with him. Nothing and no one threatened to rip her away this time. He could hold her, a thin bond, and he could see her smile in ways he'd thought he never would – that no one ever would. Even if she glanced off constantly, sometimes trembling, sometimes not.

Even if asking about her husband made her shrink like a bud against harsh sunlight – which managed to be both disappointing and disconcerting. Indeed, all through the hours she was with him, Mirio's unease grew alongside his bliss. And when Eri left, leaving behind her the white body of blooms Mirio had decided not to say was for her, the confusion of feelings refused to leave him too. And with it came a confusion of questions and more feelings. The prickle of goosebumps where Eri's hands had been in his, over the skin of his neck where he'd felt her breath in their embrace goodbye.

Where was Overhaul? Where was Overhaul? And how did her husband fit into it all? Mirio stewed over it through the lonely darkness of the morning until his alarm ripped him from his dreaminess.

And in the days that followed, Nighteye's anxiety acted as no remedy to Mirio's own.

'_Russia?_' Nighteye questioned skeptically in their phone call that first morning. '_How did she get to Russia? Overhaul's escape, perhaps, though there should have been something to document it. What else did she tell you? Did she say anything at all about Overhaul? About the bullets?_'

"No, sir. Nothing," Mirio sighed over his coffee. "She got edgy on certain subjects. Like her husband, which I can't help but be… suspicious of, I suppose you could say."

A hum reverberated over the line.

"But nothing she said would really lead back to Overhaul. At least at this stage. It seems like she's had a lot of, uh, freedom though. You know. She speaks three languages, and she dances, and she–"

'_Don't sound so doting, Mirio._' Nighteye rarely used Mirio's first name. '_This is serious_.'

"I know, sir."

'_I'm going to try find contacts in Russia. See if there's anything on that end. I'm considering sending someone down to you as well._'

Mirio straightened harshly in his seat. "No, sir. That won't be necessary." What he meant was – the risk of spooking Eri was too great. Both for him personally and, if there was something questionable to be found, officially. "I'll see her again. Let me figure this out."

There was a long pause. When Nighteye spoke again, Mirio knew exactly why his voice was hung with sadness. '_Mirio–_'

"Please," Mirio appealed gently. "I need to do this. It's – I can't – I'm sorry, sir. But please. I vow to keep you updated and if there's anything–"

'_Not if. There __**is **__something going on and I won't risk your life on it._'

"Thank you. But I must kindly reject your offer," Mirio joked, though he meant it in all seriousness and Sir would know it. "I'll tread carefully, and I'll get to the bottom of what's going on. However, _if _it comes to it, I will risk my life for Eri. Again. Quirk or no, I will be there for her this time."

Crackling like a sprinkler over glass, Nighteye sighed. Mirio imagined that beady, somber stare; Mirio imagined the heartbroken pity behind it, and his soul plunged. All the heartache people had poured out onto him which he'd forced himself to smile against. All the loss he'd felt over small things: when Nejire and Tamaki's daughters' quirks manifested, when he'd looked in the mirror at all his useless muscle. All for this. Because of this. For this.

If he could be one thing, it would be Eri's hero. She may not have needed it anymore. The way she looked at him may soon have been replaced with resentment. But regardless, Mirio would not give her up again.

'_The moment anything – anything – goes wrong, I am sending in an army,_' Nighteye conceded upon a sigh. A small victory. '_Until then, you will keep me informed day and night_.'

"Sir, yes, sir!" Mirio grinned.

And so the week came and went. Meetings. Contracts. Handshakes and amicable small talk with pros and sidekicks and PR reps.

Like clockwork amongst it all though, that achingly familiar number called on the same evening at the same time as Mirio had hoped it would, Eri's voice on the other end speaking in a hushed rush of excitable words; and two nights later, a new bouquet of flowers gleaming in pinks upon the table (the old lady at the flower shop had recognised Mirio instantly), there Eri came in a knitted sweater despite the late spring heat.

Another week. And another one. And another. Each bringing with it a new arrangement of blooms – shades of yellow in daffodils, hues of purple in hydrangeas, and an extravagant amount of lilies – and when Eri questioned it, Mirio only said it was a perk offered by the hotel. Weekly flower arrangements. Weekly joy in seeing Eri's features bloom more beautiful than any bouquet.

More than that, it was a weekly joy to read into the things she said and the things she didn't. To analyse them like secret messages: the clothing she wore, how carefully she sipped her tea, the snacks she chose to pick upon (the sweet things, and with a surprising enthusiasm) the night Mirio decided to try order them food once again. She flinched every time he moved, and still said nothing of her husband. But she spoke about ballet, and the woman named Anya, and she told Mirio all about the books she read.

And he – he responded in kind by telling her every pleasant detail about himself until he felt fruitfully sapped like an apple to be squashed into juice.

And Eri – Eri smiled. She smiled small, and shy, and uncertain. She made little gestures that could either have been endearing or heartbreaking. Such as how she rubbed at the bottom of her stomach without realising it when Mirio spoke about Tamaki and Nejire's girls. Such as how her shoulders rose into her neck whenever the word 'quirk' came up in conversation.

And on the latest night, before she disappeared into the darkness like a dream-fairy (Eri-fairy… it had a ring to it…) Mirio kissed the back of her hand like a dashing knight. All the bird-light undulations of her bones, the petal spread of veins, the pristine whiteness of her skin – he pressed his lips to it all tenderly and thoughtlessly, relishing the tightening of her fingers against his and the dewy glimmer with which she looked at him before darting off.

Nighteye struggled to accept the softness of it all. Bubble Girl too, tutting at Mirio over the phone together with Sir on their bi-nightly phone calls.

As it turned out after ruthless digging, Overhaul had indeed gone to Russia. With Chronostasis and with Eri. It had all been arranged by The Mafia, who fostered rather more power on their side of the world than Overhaul's yakuza had managed in Japan. However, beyond that, trails ran dark. And Mirio only continued to float upon the cloud which separated him from reality. Him, the thirty year old man almost thirty-one, in no rush to find the dangers with which he danced.

At least, not until the next week, when no call came from Eri on the evening Mirio expected it and when no knock came on his door two nights later.


	9. viii

viii.

Back when they'd first gone to Russia, Kai hadn't so much as looked at Eri. For over a year. He hadn't looked at her, hadn't touched her, had very rarely spoken to her – and though it should have seemed a blessing, Eri had returned over and over to _why_. Why had he so suddenly forgotten about her? Left her behind? Handed her over to Chrono and Russian strangers to care for as though she were a spent doll?

Though the very thought of him left Eri terrified like the feeling of black ice through her bones, Kai also happened to be the only life Eri had come to know. She hated everything about him. She hated how much it hurt when he touched her. But more than that, she hated the empty space that was left behind when his hands were gone. At least his disgust and the pain it inflicted had been some solid sense of routine. Of feeling.

It was the first thing she thought about in the morning. The last thing to cross her mind at night. Today? Would he come for her today? No. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after.

But when he didn't – when only the Russian strangers bounded in with words Eri didn't understand, or when Chrono was the only face to peer around her door – Eri had felt herself crumble in the most awful muddle of relief and shame and frustration. She'd spent days curled up in a foreign bed and nights staring at foreign toys she'd cared nothing for. Hating herself. Feeling empty. Betraying every urge in her body by wishing for Kai.

The first respite had come when Chrono had found her crying. He'd scooped her up like something precious and had held her in his lap. He'd rocked her to sleep, saying nothing, leaving without a word and allowing Eri to wake up all tucked and warm in her bed.

He'd been the one to tell her that Kai hadn't forgotten about her.

He'd been the one to tell her that Kai was only negotiating with the Russians.

And after the year had passed, the second respite came. One day, instead of Chrono, Kai was the one to bring her lunch. To watch her eat. Then he'd taken her hand and had led her to a new room in the Russian house Eri had never seen. A room with the sheen of polished silver, cold and metallic and glinting in clinical darkness. It had smelled of chemicals. There'd been needles of all sizes. Chrono was there; two or three other faces Eri didn't know too. And throughout the entire process, Eri had only flinched instinctively. She hadn't made a sound. She hadn't cried.

She had only watched Kai, and marveled over the slicing pain she felt all across her body. How terrible and real it was.

Afterwards, her legs having refused to work no matter how well Kai had put them back together, Kai had carried Eri back to her room. And she, face in his shoulder, had thanked him.

Eri still hated it: the ooze of her own blood over her skin and watching her body being torn apart. But there was always relief. Relief that it had happened and relief that it was over. Sometimes, on weeks like this one, it was necessary to do two sessions instead of one. The pain was double. But so was the lethargic stupor that followed, and Eri invariably found herself relishing her drugged out weakness. Knowing her life still followed the same order as always. Knowing she'd hate herself the next day for how easily she accepted it all.

Usually, she woke up in bed with coffee on the bedside. This time, she woke up on the couch cocooned in a duvet. There was a coffee pot _and _a small sugar bowl on the table. There was a ballet performance of Coppélia playing on the TV, still in its first Act.

Eri's head was not on the pillow, but on something much warmer. More alive with the hard tense of muscle. Goosebumps raised themselves down her neck like small soldiers to attention. Agonisingly slow and nauseatingly gentle, fingers combed themselves through her hair. Sitting up would be torture. But she wanted to drink her coffee. With three - maybe four - teaspoons of sugar. She wanted to loosen the bandages around her arms and to restart the Coppélia performance.

Feeling a stake scrape itself down her spine, Eri pushed herself to sit.

Stiff agony.

Raw throbs through her limbs.

The pain was always double after double sessions.

For some moments, everything seemed to dot itself before her. Eri sat there, tightly bundled in the duvet and feeling herself sway though she was certain she remained perfectly still.

Next to her, watching through vacant golds, Kai was quiet. Black jeans. Slipper-clad feet crossed upon the coffee table. Purple sleeplessness had hung itself beneath his eyes, and there was a laziness about the way his fingers traced themselves down the back of Eri's head, catching onto knots. He tended also to be tired after double sessions, leaving any remaining work to Chrono and devoting all his remaining energy to smothering Eri with ominous, possessive affections.

Eri blinked at him, the red-hued haze receding from her vision. She was too tired to be disgusted by his closeness, too tender in too many places to do anything but lean into the way he dragged his fingers along the shape of her arm.

His voice was scratchy through the mask. "How do you feel?"

"Fine."

"You didn't eat anything before yesterday's session."

"I was still nauseous."

Under the accusing perk of his eyebrow, Eri shrank into the folds of the blanket. "We've spoken about this before, Eri," Kai said pointedly, less concerned for Eri than for everything else. "Things don't go smoothly if you don't eat first. You only make it difficult for yourself."

She couldn't stop her bottom lip's feeble quiver. "I'm sorry. I just felt so sick."

A forgiving sigh. Kai asked about her bandages, and Eri wordlessly squirmed her arms out from the duvet for him to take. To loosen their white confinements. There was always a fleeting horror in seeing her skin so mauled. No. She didn't even have skin anymore. She only had bulging scars in shades of pink, red, purple like mutations. Eri had to look away while Kai rewrapped the bandages, overly aware of her wrists in his palm. He never seemed particularly bothered by the gross mottles of flesh and tissue – ironic, all things considered.

A throb ran itself outwards from Eri's heart. Mirio would think they were disgusting, these mounds of scar all down her limbs and back and stomach. He'd planted a kiss on the back of her hand – oh, it made Eri shiver just to think about it; but he wouldn't do that if he could only see how close his lips had been to such vulgar deformities.

Bandages more comfortably constricting, Eri returned her arms to the safety of the duvet. She'd almost forgotten about Coppélia on the TV, its music little more than background noise.

"Kai," she murmured, eyes now set upon the scene of fluttering pink skirts and stage sets. "Can I phone Anya-chan a little earlier today? There's something important I need to ask her."

"Seems you've had a lot of important questions lately," Kai said. Did he suspect something? "You'll have to ask Kurono. You won't be phoning Anya this week."

Eri's back jolted itself into stiff straightness. "What?"

"She's going to be unavailable over the next few days."

"But why?"

"Don't get upset, Eri. It's unnecessary."

"But – _but–_" The roof could have caved in, the world could have ended around them. Her little oasis in the middle of the week, the immense promise it carried – thwarted with the sound of Mirio's voice fading into unattainable black at the back of her mind. Not to mention Anya's conversation being stolen away on top of it.

Like being slammed through the ribs with stone, Eri's innards did a sour tumble about themselves. She didn't notice Kai's fingers trace their way into her nape, and she had no strength to keep herself upright when he pulled her back down. Her head onto his thigh. His hand stroking its way along her hair once again. He combed out more knots; the softness of the touch left Eri unpleasantly dizzy.

Behind lids miserably shut, Eri tried to hold the image of Mirio in her mind's eye. All the little, secret things she'd discovered and buried in her heart. The stories he had told her like strange and brilliant tales. The way he poured tea carefully, looking odd with a tiny teapot in his big hands. His big, safe hands which had held hers, tiny and destructive.

Not like the way Kai held her hands. And how he'd kissed her knuckles! Just once. And if only he could do it just once more. Eri's fist clenched and loosened around the material of the duvet, and she tried hard to swallow a disappointed whimper. To disappear from Kai's hands into the darkness of her duvet cocoon, where she could play out in her mind a hush-hush little exchange of words.

Coppélia played in airy sounds in the background. Kai's fingers stopped against Eri's temples.

"What question could have been _so important _that you can sulk like this?" he demanded softly. "Just ask it now if it's so urgent."

Eri hadn't thought he'd make her say it. She reeled through excuses and hypothetical scenarios, questions she already knew the answer to. "It's – I was just wondering about… something… It wasn't that important."

"What something?"

"The – about the –" About lots of things. But nothing she could say out loud. Eri cringed against a burn which spread itself through her stomach and groin like a stab; and while she squirmed in frozen agony, inspiration struck. Cruel timing. But beggars couldn't be choosers.

"The operation." In a desperate charmedness, Eri reached her hand out from the duvet and took Kai's. She guided his fingers down her side and into the plain of skin between her hipbones, over one particular scar. She didn't know medical terms. But she knew their aftereffects. And Kai, now leaning over her in a stiff curve, knew exactly what she was talking about. "Why did I have to have it?"

His hand flattened over her stomach, dead in its gloved texture. "Kurono explained it to you years ago already."

"I know, but I forgot."

No, she hadn't. She remembered perfectly well what Chrono had said even if it had been years ago. She'd been thirteen years old and had gotten her first period. Days later, she'd woken up with a horizontal line of stitches down below her belly button and no ovaries left in her body. No more blood in her underwear in any of the years afterwards.

"It would complicate things if you were to get pregnant," Kai said blandly, as though he were talking about too much salt on a piece of chicken. His fingers curled against the skin beneath Eri's shirt. "Besides which, you wouldn't want children anyway. You yourself were a very irritating little girl, remember?"

Eri sighed, simultaneously loathing and relishing the hot weight of Kai's palm along her stomach. It was soothing over the acidic anxiety which burned its way outwards.

"Fortunately," Kai continued, running his thumb over one of the other scars between Eri's hipbone and ribs, "you turned out to be an acceptable adult. So much more well-behaved."

Well-behaved. Eri had nothing to say to that. _Well-behaved_, as if she were no adult at all. She didn't exactly feel like one, so uselessly drained and feeding herself into Kai's touch. The coffee was going cold in the pot. Coppélia moved onto its next Act. Eri, seeing and hearing through a dazed blur, closed her eyes once more and imagined the feel of Mirio's hand on her skin. She imagined it was his lap against which her head rested – indeed, a sweet image to fall asleep to, no matter how sick and sore she may have felt.

Well-behaved. She'd always been so well-behaved.


	10. ix

ix.

Eri narrowed her eyes at the dress, a satiny flow of teal laid out on the bed. It was nothing spectacular, though beautiful in its way, and lounged against the white of the sheets it seemed a glamorous shadow. A blue-green sheen waiting for a body. One very tall, at that, and Eri – not being small as such but more elfin than average – somehow doubted she'd fill the length of it. Its long, loose sleeves. A neckline disconcertingly plunging.

Tapping her feet anxiously, their pat-pat muted by her socks, she turned her gaze to Chrono.

His eyebrows stood raised in expectant attention, and he cocked his head at her. Here, in the depths of the home, he didn't wear his mask, and so the probing smile upon his lips was bared for Eri to wince against. "It's pretty, isn't it?" he said. Eri, still with a lingering dizziness from the week's sessions, only nodded. Chrono pinched the material between his fingers and rubbed gently. "From a boutique in Kyoto."

"I like the colour." That being the only thing Eri liked. "But don't you think it's too… I don't know… It doesn't look like it'll fit me."

"It's your size."

"Maybe I still have to grow into it," Eri smiled, feeling false.

In a swooping movement, Chrono took the dress and held it up against Eri. It gathered at her feet, soft pools of richness in shimmering hues. A sash was camouflaged in the waist. The neckline swooped even lower than Eri had originally thought. Too dark. Too elegant. Too grown up for the child inside of her.

As a little girl, in both Japan and in Russia, Eri had been given lots of toys. She'd never really played with any of them, instead lining them up on shelves like lambs to the slaughter; but any other girl would have died for such a collection, would probably have gawked and fingered and clutched at Eri's toys with jealous fervor. At some point though, the toys had stopped coming. Replaced with things like jewelry and clothing and shoes until it was no longer a little girl's playground but a woman's, with silk scarves and sapphire hairpins and pretty dresses from boutiques in Kyoto.

Always from Kai. Eri felt filthy whenever she put them on.

"It might be a little long," Chrono conceded with an honest eye on the dress, looking thoughtful. "You have high heels though, don't you?"

Eri did have high heels. But intimidated by the thought of them, she replied only with a shrug.

Chrono set the dress back down in its sprawl across the sheets. "Do you like it?" In Eri's pause, he likely realised she didn't, and so decided to add with negotiating gentleness, "You could always wear a scarf, if you're worried about showing too much of your chest. This bit is very low." He pointed to the neckline.

Eri rocked onto her toes. "I'll play around with it sometime."

"You might want to play around with it this morning. Preferably in the next half hour."

"Does Kai want to see?"

"Something like that. But not now… Later."

Something terrible passed itself in a shudder down Eri's spine. She stared at Chrono, feeling her mouth open and close like a floundering fish with sounds and statements that wouldn't come, and Chrono gasped quietly at whatever expression began to twist itself into Eri's features. On top of not wearing a mask, he also wasn't wearing gloves, and so his hands were cold as he pressed them to Eri's cheeks.

"Come now, Eri-chan, you don't need to look so confused," he said, and drummed his fingers across her skin. "We just have a little surprise for you this evening, is all, and it's important for you to look nice."

"This evening?" The words pressed themselves into the walls of Eri's throat. "_This_ evening?"

"This evening," Chrono smiled again. "Although we'll be leaving for it early in the afternoon."

"But what about Kai's meeting? He has to go, doesn't he?"

It shouldn't have come out with such pleading. Lungs scoffing against oxygen, Eri waited for Chrono's reply. But his smile only wavered disapprovingly, and he looked between the dress and Eri. Hard to read, though Eri knew he saw something of a horrified reluctance in her expression – it was always there, of course, snaking beneath the surface with threatening potency; but it had never seeped out so freely before. Eri looked down against her rearing unease. "He has to go."

But Kai didn't have to do anything.

Dropping his hands, Chrono took Eri's and stroked her knuckles with his thumbs. So soft, like air being blown across her skin. Perhaps with even a trace of the same gentleness as Mirio. Eri's stomach ignited with flutters, and colour rose into her cheeks with springtime warmth. She swallowed. She smiled tightly at Chrono's questioning stare.

It felt strange – having a secret. Not being able to tell Chrono.

"A change in routine will be good," he said. No. Eri felt her eyebrows raise. Just as there'd been the pleading hint in her voice, so too was there in his. Subtle as a wind chime's bell, but definitely there. "Overhaul organised this _specially _for you, Eri-chan. You're bound to enjoy it."

Disagreement was a new flavour on Eri's tongue. Even if it was quiet and mild. "But what if I don't want to go?"

"Eri-chan," Chrono sounded surprised. "Think about–"

"I don't feel very well," Eri lied. Again. And it was a little too exciting. "And I don't… like… the dress." The truth. "Can't Kai just–"

"No. He can't."

The smile vanished from Chrono's face, and the bubbles of daring in Eri's ego went along with it. Somber in a way she hadn't seen for a long time, Chrono let go of her hands. The wrinkles about his eyes, thin and pale like hairline cracks, seemed to darken. Aging. Staring hard and stone-grey through Eri's brittle sense of overexcited resolve.

She dropped her eyes to the dress. She thought of how to take back what she'd started. "S-Sorry. I'm sorry, Kurono-san."

He sighed, sounding tired. He probably was tired, having worked through the last two nights. "Kai wanted to surprise you," he said.

It was rare for Chrono to use Kai's real name in front of Eri. It was something reserved only for those times when Kai would hurt her (twisting her wrists for not listening, breaking a rib for saying no) or when the threat of it loomed perilously. Chrono would always swoop in, stroking Eri's hair while she cried in darkness and telling her Kai wouldn't hurt her if only she'd be good. If only she'd be good.

She shuddered.

Chrono continued, "There's a theater in Fukuoka where a ballet is being performed. I can't remember the name."

"A ballet," Eri repeated despondently. "Oh."

The expression in Chrono's expression changed somewhat, tinted with the satisfaction of having caught Eri's attention. "That Russian company is performing," he whispered meaningfully. "Anya's company. Perhaps she forgot to mention it to you."

Something prickled to life like a thousand starbursts through her bones. Traitorous fortune! At the sound of Anya-chan's name, Eri gasped. She gawked. She didn't forget for a moment about Mirio – What had he thought when she hadn't phoned him? What would he think when she didn't show up at his door that night? Eri held the thought close to her heart, but also considered for the moment what sort of treasure had just fallen into her lap.

To see Anya-chan after so many years! To see her in that purple cloud of perfume and ballet shoes and dark, devilish beauty of endless fascination.

What would she think of all Eri's flowering secrets? Would Eri dare tell her?

Chrono made a gratified sound like a hum. "Go clean up now," he cooed, and began a quiet trudge to leave Eri and the dress alone together. "And maybe don't wear a scarf with the dress. Overhaul will like it better without."

If there was one thing Eri didn't need to be told, it was what Kai would and wouldn't like. With the sound of the door dragging closed, she took the dress and held it up before the dressing table mirror. Its dark colour made her look whiter than ever, and her whiteness made the colour look even darker. Pretending to be a little girl sampling clothes for dress up, she tilted her head to consider it more fully. She swished it about airily. She pulled off her pajamas and slipped herself into the dress's silky clutches.

All the while, the matryoshka doll watched with its judging, quiet eyes. The business card with Togata Mirio's name still lay like a growing baby in its depths. Eri, unhappy about the contempt with which the little Russian figure considered her, turned its painted gaze away.

Then she curtseyed to her reflection. Her chest was boney and exposed, the only expanse of naked flesh – and rather too much of it, at that. But she did look pretty. Like a woman, even with her bedhead and skinny limbs.

"Why thank you, sir." She paused. "Prince Mirio. Prince Lemillion? Prince Mirio." She grinned shyly at her reflection's blush. "I would most certainly like to dance. To dance with you, Prince Mirio."

Another curtsey, this time more dramatic so that the teal material gathered more deeply about her feet. Then, imagining all the dances Anya-chan had taught her and all the dances she'd read about in books, Eri pranced away from the mirror in silly twirls. She tripped several times over the material. Prince Mirio was always there to catch her, laughing with honey-warmth at her clumsiness.

* * *

**A/N: I had so much more to add to this chapter, but this just felt like a nice place to end for now... Next time, we'll be meeting a certain Russian ballerina who brings with her some terrible intrigue. In the meantime though, do follow, favourite and review. ;)**


	11. x

x.

It was only once. Mirio shouldn't have panicked as he had.

But not getting her call had left him gasping, grasping at possibilities – and in the evening's dreadful silence, he'd picked apart every word Eri had spoken over the past weeks. Measuring. Overthinking. Typing out messages to Sir with all sorts of desperate jargon and receiving the same reply. Stay calm. Don't act rashly. Don't panic just yet. But how could Mirio not tumble out of his mind when Eri's voice hadn't met him on the other end of the phone line?

He was supposed to see her that night. Though the clock only showed seven thirty, Mirio glanced continually to the door. Eager, petrified, and trying hard to be patient. He refreshed his emails, as he would do on any normal evening. The kettle had just boiled and so waited to be poured into tea leaves (although, Mirio could easily have stomached shochu instead).

Out the window, he stared into the night in wait, imagining visions of white dancing through the darkness towards him. She'd promised. Flowers in impatient reds stood upon the table, ready for her arrival. Last time, she'd mentioned wanting to try plum wine – and for the evening to come, Mirio had ordered one of the hotel's most expensive bottles. He still had so much to tell her. So, so much to ask her.

Alas, there was no Eri-fairy to be seen, not yet, and Mirio sighed. What if she didn't come just as she hadn't called?

No. _No _– she'd come.

She'd promised.

Taking his leave from the windowsill, Mirio seated himself at the table by the TV. Commercials for fast food played themselves in the background, bright faces speaking fast and enthusiastic. On his laptop screen, a real estate page was open with houses for sale and for rent in Kagoshima. Mirio scrolled, eying out two bedroom cottages. Near the bay. Near the market. Big windows overlooking little gardens with vegetables and flower beds. Would he be able to grow lilies? Would Eri come visit him there, amongst flowers he knew nothing about and a home which would be completely, wholeheartedly for her?

God. This wasn't who Mirio was – a man who went about buying an entire house to be nearer to a girl. A married girl. Woman. He pressed his fingers to his eyes until he saw dots, as though blinding himself would make the whole thing any less preposterous.

It was all perfectly innocent though. It was only to be close to Eri and nothing more. In case she needed him, since Mirio couldn't shake an inkling apprehension about nothing in particular, the fear that something was desperately wrong without being able to put his finger on what.

Or in case she wanted him, his company. In case she wanted their weekly visits to turn to nightly stays. Domestic little secrets. A cozy couch rather than sitting cushions; glasses of wine on the table and music rather than TV ads in the background; her shoes and scarfs and sweaters on a coat-hanger or over chairs or on Mirio's floor–

_Ping!_

A new notification made his breath jump out from his lungs. The swelling buzz inside of his stomach dissipated into the fluttering static of butterflies through oblivion. He hesitated, eyes on the screen. He blinked tensely at the email from Nighteye's official address, knowing full-well what it was without having to open it.

And indeed, it was a long while – agonizing, unapologetic tickticktick – before he opened it.

* * *

Diminutive handfuls of people began to file into the theater, not once glancing up to the box in which Eri sat between Kai and Chrono. The three of them had been inside for ages already despite the fact that it was still long before the performance was due to start. Maybe about twenty minutes still to go. Though it was just as well, because Eri was having a notoriously difficult time settling into her seat.

She'd gotten away with so much this evening. So much more than she would have ever gotten away with before, even when Kai was in the best of moods.

Deliberately doing what Chrono had told her not to, she'd worn a scarf with the dress – one of Mirio's favourites, the chiffon one with bursting, pastel waves of pink and blue. Kai had raised an eyebrow at it, had even looked disappointed and made Eri flinch ever so slightly. But he hadn't told her to take it off.

And knowing perfectly well that Kai would have wanted her to wear the perfume that smelled like lotus flowers, she'd instead opted for something different – the one like citrus blossoms which, she'd noticed, had made Mirio lean in close to her a few times before.

Small victories like these. Little things she knew – oh, she _knew _– Kai would notice and possibly question but wouldn't do anything about. Where the bravery had come from for her to try out such stunts, Eri couldn't decide. But it had certainly left her giddy. Excited and slightly uncomfortable. Not in a bad way. She wasn't entirely sure it was in a good way either. But, of course these were all just little things. Small victories that didn't mean much.

What had really left her heart floundering like a bee under glass was something much bigger. Something thrillingly extravagant and frightening and very, very, terribly grown up.

Kai had let her drink wine.

They'd gone out for dinner (an unnecessarily early dinner) at an expensive restaurant almost entirely deserted. Eri had been unable to abandon the thought of her foiled evening with Mirio, and how he had promised her a taste of plum wine. Forbidden fruit, the flavour of which Eri had spent many sleepless hours imagining onto her tongue. And while Chrono and Kai had gone on talking about something Eri didn't care about, she'd stewed. She'd brooded. She'd driven herself close to madness with thoughts of Mirio and thoughts of wine until she'd hardly been able to bear the temptation of it any longer.

She'd touched Kai's hand all soft and well-behaved, waiting for permission to speak; when she had such permission, she'd asked in the nicest voice she could possibly muster if she could please – please, please, oh pretty please, darling husband – have a glass of wine. Just one. Just this once. Even if it was just a quarter of a glass

And though it was not without a moment's hesitation, Kai had said yes.

And Eri had drunk a full glass of wine and had thought of Mirio the whole time.

Now her head spun and the floor seemed about ready to drop out from beneath her. She tried to watch the faces of people as they took their seats. They were blurred and their movements made her dizzy. She looked over to Kai any number of times, his hand scratching discreetly at the bumps which had reared themselves in his neck. The more people came into the theater, the more he scratched – because such a flimsy face mask wasn't nearly the same sort of protection against disease as that stupid, horrible bird-beak had been.

Eri shuddered. She'd hated that thing.

Time went by quickly. Possibly because her sense of time had gone out the window, dazed and fascinated by the wobbly look of everything; possibly because she'd lost herself in imagining that Mirio was holding her hand, stroking her knuckles, glancing at her with an expression she didn't understand – even though it was Kai doing all those things. It didn't feel nearly so bad if Eri pretended it wasn't him.

At last, the lights dimmed into blackness. The orchestra Eri hadn't noticed sprung into life with Swan Lake's overture (damn the slicing pain which stabbed itself through her gut with white-hot venom), and she held her breath. Tried to steady her swimming vision and flustered heart before Anya-chan appeared on stage.

* * *

The name had been so unsuspecting before now. So tinted with the love-coloured adoration of Eri's voice and smile, Mirio had quietly refused to consider the insinuations which lay just beneath.

But Sir's email was a cruel stroke of reality. '_Re: Anya, Bolshoi_' glaring in the subject line, photographs of eleven different women staring out at Mirio in mocking accusation – blacks and whites of portfolio portraits, all their faces sharp and high-boned and dripping with the possibilities of beauty and evil. One in particular was pointed out with an asterisk, her accompanying biography poisonously highlighted by Sir himself. '_I believe this is the woman we ought to be looking for_,' he had written. And indeed, for his laxness, Mirio hated himself.

He hadn't thought to mention this Anya woman to Nighteye until a few days ago. How could he, Mirio, have been so caught up? So careless? How could he have let something so vital have gone ignored until now?

Really. Some hero he would have been.

Ivanovska Anya was the Bolshoi's prima ballerina, thin-lipped and with collar bones like balconies, all the threat of a hyena in her eye. There was something beautiful about her, something tragic and corrupt. But that wasn't important – what mattered, what made Mirio cuss and hang his head into his hands, was that she was the Mafia boss's daughter-in-law.

* * *

Eri cried. With relief when Kai left halfway through the performance and didn't come back, the scraping, angry rash in his neck clearly too much for him. With agony when Anya-chan – tall, watery Anya-chan in pure white – danced the part of the dying Swan Princess. And with surprise when she looked over to Chrono to find him crying too.

She didn't ask. She didn't bring it up when they left their seats to meet Kai in the foyer. If anything, she pretended she hadn't noticed and Chrono didn't seem to realise what she'd seen. But Eri replayed it several times over in her mind how a tear had glistened silvery down his cheek. One, single tear, the rest dammed up against his lashes and in his eyes' corners. Incandescent along his pale skin, glinting before the white of the stage lights.

Had something happened?

Was he crying because of something Eri had done? Was she in trouble?

Still unsteady but more sober than she'd been two hours ago, Eri stared ahead wide-eyed and hearing nothing. Kai touched his hand to the small of her back and led her out from the theater. Chrono had gone to the bathroom. He'd meet up with them later, he'd said. And without him there, just her and Kai alone for the first time that evening, Eri's stomach went weak. She staggered through the thoughts of everything she'd done to defy Chrono and Kai that evening and that week and her entire life, her previous daring dissipating like the tear had disappeared down Chrono's jaw.

Chrono never cried. Kai never cried. Mirio had, that first night. But Chrono never cried, and suddenly nothing made sense. Eri's innards plunged, and she considered that maybe he hadn't liked Sawn Lake. Had he literally been bored to tears? Or instead, had he been moved by how beautifully Anya-chan danced?

Or maybe… Maybe he was disappointed, because he knew exactly what Eri was up to with all the little rebellions in her heart. Maybe he'd already told Kai.

Instead of leading her back towards the restaurants and shops, Kai directed Eri in the opposite direction. Away. Away from the golden glow of lights and the smells of food and the romance of couples on dates. He took her into the darkness, around the side and back of the theater's grand building where there was nobody. Eri could still hear echoes of people behind them. He'd chase her if she fled. Knowing she was helpless. She was wearing high heels – clack, clack, clack on the paving – and had no hope of outrunning him.

Eri counted the ways she could apologise for everything and nothing. She braced herself for broken bones, thought about Mirio's voice rather her blood dripping onto the black, dirty floor.

"I don't want to be here long," Kai said without looking at Eri, and she was more horrified by the softness in his voice than she would ever have been by any pain through her body. "Be a good girl and be quick about it."

They only walked a few more steps before they reached a door in the wall, its outline leaking with warm light.

Kai opened it and gestured for Eri to go in.

Powdery smells of perfume and make-up and deodorant met them. In a room like a small reception area, hung wall-to-wall with posters of dramas and ballets, operas and symphonies, there were several people Eri recognised from the programme booklet – though now they weren't in tutus, but in sweatpants and boots. Bags were slung over their shoulders. Sweat gelled their hair back in slick buns and comb overs.

At the closeness of it all, the warmth and the brightness, Eri could feel Kai gag.

Then came a voice. That scratchy, gorgeous voice like smoked honey, calling out in Russian – "Eri! My sweetness!"

Eri almost cried once more. She threw herself away from Kai and through the unnamed ballerinas, tumbling forward in a clumsy mess of teal material and delight until she felt herself fall into those graceful, swan-lithe arms. An embrace. Several kisses on her forehead bound to leave lipstick stains – the sort Chrono had wiped off of Eri's face many times before. "Anya!" She smelled the same. Of smoke and purple perfume and all the mysteries of womanhood. "You didn't tell me you'd be here. You were so beautiful!"

The other ballerinas stared oddly, perhaps surprised by the Japanese girl who could speak Russian. Perhaps contriving amongst themselves and in their minds how Eri could possibly have been related to someone like Anya-chan.

Hands slightly calloused and slightly shaky, Anya-chan took hold of Eri's cheeks. "Oh my, my," she cooed. "_You _are even more exquisite than I remember. Just look at you! This gorgeous dress and those pointy shoes of yours. What a lady you are, my little apple! Did you enjoy the show?"

"Every minute!"

"Why are you blushing so?" Her eyes, perfectly round as dark plums, flickered away. "Were you doing something exciting out there in the darkness while you were waiting?"

Eri, not realising she'd been blushing before, certainly blushed now. And not pleasurably. "I–"

Kai cleared his throat. Anya pulled her mouth like a cat considering a sour rat. "And you?" she questioned Kai, the sugar-coated point of her voice making Eri recoil as though she'd been slapped. "Did _you _enjoy yourself?"

"Quite."

For as long as Eri could remember, they'd never liked each other. Kai thought Anya-chan was trash because she was quirkless – this he'd told Eri multiple times before, his voice searing like a blade and wounding just as deeply. Once, he'd also called Anya-chan a whore. Only once though, and Eri had only overheard it through closed doors. She'd been twelve. And she'd thought that if Anya-chan was a whore, she wanted to be one too.

Because whores drank wine and snuck out at night to see men they shouldn't have been seeing.

Raven eyes still locked onto Kai, Anya stroked Eri's cheeks with her thumbs. She had a marvelous talent for multitasking. "And Hari?" No one ever called Chrono Hari besides her. It was the weirdest thing. "Where is he now?"

Kai came closer, so that the heat of him seemed to smolder in Eri's back.

"Ask him yourself," he said with all the dead politeness in the world. "He'll buy you a drink at the theater bar."

"I better dress up nice then."

A quiet hum like a stalking, black animal in Kai's throat.

Already, Eri had gotten away with so much, and now her feelings swirled with gathering confusion inside of her. The ecstasy of having gotten away with tasting the once-unattainable acidity of alcohol. Mirio like a secret in her heart. Insolence and excitement and audacity flooded Eri from Anya's touch. It drained out of her with the weight of Kai's closeness. And for some moments, a barrier or a prize between two warring gazes, Eri considered the possibility of asking – please, please, pretty please, darling husband – if she too could have another drink at the theater bar.

But she could smell Kai's bad mood like a miasma. She imagined the red bumps spreading themselves down his stomach and legs like the disease he so desperately despised. Scratching. Scratching. Scratching. His skin. Her skin.

She grasped Anya's hands and grinned, hoping the distraction would prove fruitful. "Can I see your tutus before you leave? And the stage. Would they let you take me to look at the stage?"

"My apple!" Anya gasped, and seemed to forget that Kai existed. "Anything for you!"


	12. xi

xi.

Eri woke that night with a scraping in her throat. A dull drumming of urgency she couldn't quite place.

Chaotic dreams – of spinning material and music carrying through her bones in ghostly echoes, of her ankles breaking beneath her in ribbons and splintering grace – had left her restless, unable to fall back asleep. For a long time, she watched the shape of Kai's chest beneath the sheets. Rising and falling next to her. Familiar, like a long-lived prison cell. Eri imagined herself being a bird trapped inside Kai's ribcage. She sighed at the absurdity of it.

Gently, hoping not to wake him, she sat and slid her legs off the side of the bed. The floor was cold beneath her feet. The hairs on her neck prickled to attention at the sweep of air down her shirt. But before she could stand, his hand was at her wrist, not clutching but touching with softness enough to make Eri stiffen.

Of course he'd wake up. He never slept soundly.

"I'm just thirsty," Eri whispered, not mentioning the headache which quietly slinked itself between her temples. Not painful, not particularly uncomfortable. Just a fuzzy hand waving before her vision, the colour of white wine. "I want some water."

"Bring me some too."

Then he turned away, making a falling sound like a moan. And though Eri knew he wasn't asleep, he lay still and silent enough for her to pretend he was.

So off she tip-toed to the kitchen, through the curling passage and up the stairs, the dimness now like an old friend. Watching her. At it again, Eri? These walls can speak – Kai will know you've gone, gone, gone. But we won't tell, Eri – run, run, run. Run to Togata Mirio. Past Chrono's bedroom where no light shone. Up the stairs. Past the dining room. The kitchen window waited to be propped open. Oh, how easy it would have been. Everything somersaulted and swam at the thought. How long would it be before Kai came looking for her, if she went? A few minutes. Probably less.

A sound stopped Eri in her tracks, something low and deep. Something in the dark. She stood there, in the middle of the house with all its rooms and all its corners, her pulse in her mouth and her limbs tensing numbly. She knew that sound from somewhere, though she couldn't place it.

For some time, things were quiet again, and Eri stood frozen. Beginning to shiver without being entirely able to blame the cold. Maybe it was just the house wheezing, making noises which resounded more potently through Eri's tired sense of over-awareness.

But then there it was again. The sound. A breath. Louder now – a groan – followed by a 'ssh'.

Coming from the kitchen.

Eri knew she should've turned back, that she should've left whatever nighttime crawlers breathed heavily and secretly to the shadows while she herself hurried back to Kai. But her body didn't listen. Her heart tugged her closer, a frightened and morbid curiosity drawing her toward the lightless arch which lead to the kitchen. The closer she got, the more she pressed herself to the wall. And pressed tightly enough that she was almost part of the brick and paint, Eri poked her head around the corner.

It couldn't have been real, what she found. She could almost have convinced herself it wasn't, were it not for the unwavering solidity of the movements; the harsh, tangible moans and the way light lined itself against two bodies rather than simply shining through them.

Before anything, Eri saw skin. Just skin on skin on skin on the kitchen counter. A muscled waist in between a tangle of legs. A bum, a breast through a hand.

Then Eri saw Anya's face – perhaps a dream; why would Anya be in their kitchen at this hour? Her neck looked weak on her shoulders and her features were twisted in something that looked like pain. But not pain. A lot more beautiful than that, and quiet too as Chrono – Eri saw him too even though his back was towards her, even though she told herself that it couldn't possibly have been him – rocked his hips fast in the circumference of Anya's legs. Her hands clawed at his back. She looked like she was gasping even though no sound came out while Chrono's face was in her cheek. The shadows were too dark for Eri to see whether he kissed her or bit her or simply held her there. His mouth on her skin. His skin on her skin.

Wrong. It was all wrong.

But Eri heard the sounds, suddenly shrill and nauseating and strange, but undeniable. Sounds she somehow hadn't thought Chrono was capable of making.

Soft moans. Muttered somethings. He said Anya's name a lot, and sometimes she would say his name back – Hari, Hari, _Hari. _Other times she would moan too, or giggle quietly. And by the bubbling, shattering loveliness of Anya's hushed laughter, Eri felt betrayed. Why would she giggle? Why was this happening? Eri didn't understand.

_Why was this happening?_

"You feel so good," Chrono whispered in Russian (his Russian had always been the best; then Eri's; then Kai's) just loud enough for the words to reach Eri as she watched horrified and fascinated. "Ah, fuck, Anya, yes! Yes–"

"Ssh," Anya whispered back, breathy. "Someone's going to hear us." Tender. The same way she used to whisper stories and comforts to Eri. But different. So, so different.

Eri heard. And Eri saw. And Eri tried to look away but couldn't, hoping one of them would spot her and grant her body the shock of strength to move. But she couldn't – and when Chrono gasped awfully and ecstatically, his back going stiff and straight while his neck fell backwards on his shoulders (rasping Anya's name like she was the sweetest taste on his tongue), Eri wanted to cry. Eri wanted to sob even though Anya threw her arms around Chrono's shoulder and kissed him, kissed him, kissed him. Lips to his cheeks, lips to his neck, lips to his lips.

They held each other like lovers held each other in books, naked and shrouded in the kitchen's darkness.

If Kai knew Anya was sitting – _naked! _– on the kitchen counter, he'd lose his mind.

If Kai knew Chrono was doing to Anya what he himself did to Eri, he would – what would he do? Would he be angry if he knew that she knew? Why did she feel so sick and dirty?

Eri threw her hand to her mouth, as though she might vomit or scream. And finally, when Chrono bent down and put his head in between Anya's legs (her fingers combing through his hair and his name falling from her mouth like molten sugar), Eri mustered the will to run. Run with the greatest silence she had ever managed before.

Everything was wrong.

Eri couldn't figure out why.

Why the very idea of Chrono's flesh was wrong, and why Anya's expression when Chrono had pressed his mouth to the place where mouths shouldn't have gone was wrong.

Why there was a muted throbbing in between Eri's own legs that felt not-so-wrong and in its not-so-wrongness was the worst kind of wrong there was.

And desperately afraid of how things slipped from her grasp without her being able to explain what those things were or why her entire world suddenly seemed so shaken by something as simple as… all _this_… Eri flung herself towards the only solid thing she could think of. Back down the stairs. Back through the curling passage. Into the bedroom that smelled like a hospital-cocktail of her and chemicals and Kai. Kai. Kai-Kai-Kai! She didn't cry, but was on the verge of tears as she buried herself back into the sheets.

Against him, curling herself small and hopelessly confused. Into him, sniffing deeply at the smell of his clothes and hating herself for the treacherous comfort that was to be had in the familiarity of his arms closing around her. He asked if she'd forgotten to bring him water, and Eri trembled. The sound of his voice suffocated everything, including the lingering echoes of Chrono and Anya's moans, as well as the aching in Eri's own stomach and legs.

His fingers touched her back. He sighed, breath falling atop her head. Eri nailed herself against him and drew every comfort from the fact that Kai was the same. Being close to him made her feel as disgusting as always. Being so feeble in his hold made her feel pathetic and worthless.

But at least it was the same. It didn't feel, at a surface level, like it was wrong.

* * *

The next morning, Anya threw her hands over Eri's eyes. "Guess who!"

Such beautiful hands.

Such foiled delights as Eri considered that Anya's visit to the house was supposed to be a surprise. For her. Not for her.

Eri was sure she could smell Chrono on Anya's fingers, and she couldn't bring herself to say a word. She couldn't so much as pretend to guess, or be surprised, or even look at Anya. She was ashamed, and mortified by the sickness which overcame her. She could only stare at Kai vaguely when he asked, in Japanese, why she was acting so strangely – not eating her breakfast, not paying attention to Anya across the table. Eri excused herself. She wandered to her bathroom, dizzy on sleeplessness, and gagged into the toilet bowl though nothing came up.

Still in her pajamas, her feet were cold on the tile. Head leaned onto the seat, knowing how unhygienic it was but not caring, Eri didn't move, didn't cry. She only stewed and replayed last night's montage. It was only… sex… It was only _sex_… She'd read about it and she knew what it was and she knew that, if the books were right, it wasn't supposed to be such a big deal.

Or it was, but not in the way Eri was making it a big deal.

Maybe she felt so revolted because she was disappointed. Or angry – with herself. Maybe books couldn't teach her what she needed to know because she wasn't like any of the characters – or like Anya – who actually wanted to be fondled and kissed and… what word did they sometimes use? _Fucked_.

Eri's body wasn't like theirs. Hers wasn't a woman's body. Hers was cursed. A weapon. Her body: the _thing_ to be drained and destroyed and used, used, used as a tool rather than an essence of flesh and blood.

Maybe that's why it hurt somewhere deep whenever Kai climbed himself into her. She didn't deserve to like sex.

And indeed, she didn't like sex.

But Eri knew she shouldn't have been angry with Anya and Chrono if they liked it. If they liked each other. But Anya was married; married women couldn't like other men like _that_, could they?

Then again, Eri was also married (right?) and she snuck out every week to visit Mirio. But it wasn't the same thing (was it?). She liked him, a lot. Maybe, definitely, a lot more than she should have, but not in the way that she wanted… him… _like that. _

Or did she?

A knock at the bathroom door made Eri jump and gasp. She spun her head on her shoulders, staring wide and caught-red-handed at Chrono. Standing in the doorway, he watched her with concern. His hand on the frame. His mouth, which always gave away his feelings, obscured by the face mask.

"Are you okay?" he asked, meaning it. "You didn't look well just now."

Eri nodded, not knowing what she was nodding at.

"Did seeing Anya take you rather too much by surprise?"

"Yes. No." Eri frowned. "I'm sorry."

Chrono cocked his head to the side, and in his voice there was a tease, a smile, "Maybe you're just hungover from your glass of wine last night."

"What's hungover?"

"Nevermind. I was only joking." He came towards her, removing a glove. He bent into a crouch, touching his hand to Eri's forehead. It couldn't have been her imagination that he too, smelled of Anya. "You don't have a fever. Did last night's food not agree with you?" That wasn't it. "Some air will help." No, it wouldn't. "Why don't you and Anya go relax in the garden for a little while? I'll be taking her back to Fukuoka this afternoon before her next performance, but there's still plenty of time for you two to catch up."

Eri wanted to say something. Something rude, though she didn't know what. But taking Chrono's arm, she only stood wordlessly and followed him out the bathroom, unable to look Chrono in the face because all she could picture was his bare butt and the way he'd said Anya's name.

* * *

There was nothing special about the garden. Just grass and a wall and a single bench beneath a tree – but at least the tree was blooming with magnolias. Now that the remnants of late spring were giving way to early summer, tight shades of pink and white weighed down the branches like lanterns. Eri stared up into these marshmallow-soft glows, a mug of green tea in her lap and Anya alongside her on the bench.

Neither of them spoke. Eri could feel Anya's eyes on her profile, those bruise-coloured irises on her white, hot cheeks. With the way such a gaze burned intense and worldly, it didn't seem entirely silly to think that Anya could read Eri's mind. She could probably hear all the questions Eri couldn't find words to ask. She could probably see through Eri's chest to how her heart stopped-and-started, stopped-and-started. What would she say? What would she do if Eri posed the questions and told her the secrets?

"You're unhappy," Anya murmured, jolting Eri from her brooding. "Has something happened, Apple?" she questioned quietly. "I thought you would be more excited…"

"I'm happy." Eri scrunched her hands into the skirt she wore. "I'm fine."

The space closed between them. "Then why so quiet? Why won't you look at me?"

"I saw you."

It just came out. Eri hadn't even realised it had been on her tongue. Her face blazed itself into high colour as she turned in alarm to Anya, who suddenly went stiff. Suddenly deadpan and hard in her thin, sharp expression. They both blinked at each other like two frogs on the wrong lily pad.

Anya had never been subtle. Anya understood things the moment they happened. So it surprised Eri when she pursed her lips – painted purple with lipstick – and shook her head. "What are you talking about?"

No going back now. Eri looked at her hands again in humiliation. "L-last night. I saw – I saw you and Kurono. In the kitchen. Last night." That teary tightness made its way up Eri's spine. The language suddenly felt too foreign and broken. "But it was an accident… An accident. I promise! I just wanted some water and– I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Anya."

"Eri! My lovely." The hand that still smelled like Chrono touched itself to Eri's cheek. "You weren't supposed to find out."

"I'm sorry."

"Did you tell Overhaul?"

"No." Eri thought about sipping her tea. "Does he not know?"

Anya rolled her eyes, as though the question were ridiculous. "He knows. Hari would never be able to keep a secret from him." Both Anya and Eri, in quiet knowing, considered this statement seriously, though each of them for very different reasons. "I didn't want you to discover us like this. Hari would be horrified, I know. Are you disappointed in us, Eri? My love?"

Confronted with the opportunity to say it, Eri didn't know what she felt. "It's… unexpected," Eri said. She wasn't disappointed. Confused. Shocked. Maybe a little angry, but maybe not with them, and also a little curious. "Was that – last night – the first time?"

Like a crinkling flower, Anya pulled a face. "Eri–"

"The second time, then? Or the third?"

No response.

"You and Chrono have been together _three times_?" Eri gasped, almost thrilled and desperately reeling against the feeling of being a little girl discovering something most scandalous and awful.

"Now, surely this does not matter so much." Anya tapped a finger to Eri's nose. "Don't think about–"

"Anya! _Please_!"

The chokedness that followed was shattering. A magnolia dropped from it branch and fell, hitting the grass hard and abandoned. Anya smiled – one of those false ones that looked too sad to be comforting – and she sighed profoundly so that Eri could smell that mysterious, sour stench of cigarette smoke on her breath. She swiveled herself to a stooped position at Eri's feet, and took the green tea to set it aside underneath the bench.

Her hands cocooned Eri's. "We've lost count of how many times it's been," she whispered, seeming to know that the walls could talk. That the walls would tell Kai and he would be angry. "A thousand times. Maybe two thousand. How many days are there in eight years, Eri?"

The heat drained itself from Eri's face until she went utterly cold. "Eight years."

"Eight years," Anya repeated.

"But you're–"

"Married?"

Eri nodded, her tongue too heavy in her mouth.

"Oh, Eri," Anya cooed. "Women like us don't get to choose who we belong to. But even so, we can't help what we feel. Besides," she waved away an imaginary pest, "Dmitry is too stupid to ever find out."

"But what if he does?"

"He won't."

Eri almost screamed. Eri almost cried. She replayed in her mind the way Anya and Chrono had held each other, and all the little things they'd whispered into darkness and skin. "But what if _he does_, Anya? What if he finds out and hurts Kurono? What if you can never see him again?"

Butterfly kisses traced their way over Eri's knuckles, and when Anya looked back up at her, there was the faintest silver line along her lids. Reading Eri's mind again. Perfectly plucked eyebrows rising and falling in an unspoken question mark. Anya's lips coiled like dark-scaled snakes, and then dropped into a frown. "Is this about Kurono? Or is there something else?" She stood, and rounded the bench to stand behind Eri. Those fingers, long and graceful, spread into Eri's hair and began combing. "You know Dmitry can't hurt Hari, my apple. _Not really_. So what are you worrying for?"

She knew. Anya saw right through Eri. She'd always seen right through – but still, Eri tried to salvage what little secrecy she had left. "Then he'll hurt you."

"It won't be anything new. Men like them hurt. It's all they know how to do." The tip of her thumb ran itself down Eri's nape. "But that's still not it, is it?"

Eri's resolve crashed dismally. She shook her head. "No."

"And you want to tell me what this is really about, don't you?"

Eri nodded. "Yes."

And leaning into Anya's touch, her delicate fingers running valleys through the thick length of her hair, the words swelled themselves at the very edge of her throat. Waiting. Waiting not to be secrets anymore.


	13. xii

xii.

Only after hours of debate did Mirio end up buying himself a ticket to Swan Lake. At first, it had sparked vicious turmoil between himself, Nighteye and Bubble Girl – to approach or not to approach, that was the question. Nighteye insisted firmly on the latter, and not entirely unfairly. To look Ivanovska Anya dead in the eye and demand the truth about Eri carried with it the delicate danger of a time bomb. One miscalculation and it would blow up in their faces, just as things had crumbled all those years ago during their first assault on the Shie Hassaikai. But this time, Mirio was more determined and desperate than ever before.

It was exactly because he'd held back that Eri had slipped through his fingers once, disappearing into the shadows of an alleyway while he and Midoriya Izuku had looked on hushed and decidedly helpless; it was only because of his pride that things had gone awry all those years ago. And she'd slipped through his fingers twice. This time, things had to be different, because this time he had nothing to lose except for her. He couldn't wait, he wouldn't hesitate. He needed to know, and he needed things to be different.

Though his finely wrinkled scowl had seared Mirio through the computer screen, Nighteye conceded eventually. The only condition was that he himself had to be there.

It had left Mirio gawking into webcam.

Bubble Girl too, squashed in next to Sir to be a part of the conversation, had spluttered something quiet and – with a familiarity which jolted Mirio – touched her hand to Nighteye's. But he'd pulled away. He'd shaken his head with a decided finality. "I'll be there in three days. Sit tight. Wait for me."

To tell Mirio to sit tight seemed absurd; he could sit about as tightly as an anxious bud could stop itself from blooming. Waiting was too loaded with disaster, too many sleepless, hollow minutes imagining the worst sorts of things. So Mirio, mere hours after hanging up on Nighteye and Bubble Girl, had booked himself a ticket to Swan Lake in Fukuoka.

Now here was, the very next night – in the cheap seats of a grand, lush theater. White tutus twirled and glittered across the stage in lithe flurries of movement while an orchestra bustled in the pit.

Amongst the myriad of their conversations, Eri had mentioned to Mirio without explaining entirely why that Swan Lake was her least favourite ballet. And so he couldn't help but allow his own perspective to be unfairly coloured. If Eri didn't like it, then neither would he. Not that his was a particularly valuable opinion, of course, considering he hadn't the slightest idea what was going on on stage and had a hard time following along, consumed as he was by an impending sense of doom over the disappointment Sir was sure to feel. Indeed, Nighteye's disappointment was always potent, a concoction of beady stares and silence. For it to be directed at Mirio was rare, and he knew with vivid clarity that this time would likely be the worst he'd experienced.

But still he sat there, steadfast and staring through the graceful shock of limbs at whom he figured to be Ivanovska Anya. She was smaller than he'd thought, but demanded to be looked at – something dark and wicked in that high grace as she moved from one dance to the next to the next. It could only have been her. She was everything and nothing Eri had described.

And if she was who Mirio thought, what Nighteye suspected, then she was a cornerstone in uncovering the possibility Mirio had tactfully and foolishly been denying.

He trembled through the show, and more still when it was over. In the uneasy darkness outside the theater's backstage door, he waited. Leaned against the wall, tapping his feet. Sweat dewed itself down his nape – he could hear dainty commotions just on the other side of the door. Pitter patter of feet going up and down, back and forth, and voices, voices, voices.

People came out in tracksuits and buns, smelling richly of cosmetics and hairspray.

People went in. Came out again.

Mirio had begun to lament the likelihood that he wouldn't find Ivanovska Anya here. He'd been waiting for what must have been an age already… when, lo! She burst through the door without paying him any heed. Even smaller up close. Those watery legs moved brusquely away, her head held low and scowling as she fidgeted with a cigarette and lighter. The flame flashed against her face in a fleeting yellow, casting ephemeral shadows across her terrifying cheekbones and deep, menacing eyes.

"Miss! Ivanovska-san!"

She turned, and while not looking exactly irritable, Mirio could see a hint of displeasure before it disappeared behind her stellar, staged smile.

He froze. "Uh–" What had he been thinking? He couldn't speak Russian.

Clearly sensing this, Ivanovska Anya cocked her head. "Speak little bit Japanese," she said slowly and uncertainly, lifting her fingers to make a pinching gesture. _A little bit_. Her accent was almost too thick for Mirio to understand. "You enjoy show?"

"Oh! Yes, uh, yes. I enjoyed the show."

"Autograph?"

Mirio shook his head.

"Then excuse me." She turned away, and Mirio's hand shot out to dab tentatively at her shoulder.

"No, I'm sorry, I do want an autograph," he said and emphasised every word, hoping she'd understand completely. "But for a friend. Here, I have a pen." He pulled out a small notepad along with it, having come prepared for this exact purpose.

With one hand, Anya took them, and placed her cigarette between her dark, pointed lips. "Yes. Okay." Her smile was impatient. "Name? Of friend?"

"Eri."

The pen stood poised on the paper, still for a long time – a long, _long _time – before Anya's fingers faltered and she allowed those swirling, purple irises to flick to Mirio. Like a wild animal, experienced in its composure and tight-lipped smiling, she seemed to consider him with a bruising question mark across her expression. "And you?" she questioned eventually, careful. "Maybe your name too?"

"No, no, my name isn't important," Mirio chuckled. The sound was too false.

"Is important," Anya emphasised.

"Really, I don't think–"

"Mirio Togata." Apparently decided, she thrust the pen and notepad back to a stunned Mirio, and then blew a cloud of smoke at him. "Yes? _Mirio To-ga-ta_?" she repeated, announcing each syllable like a swearword. Smile now gone.

Making Mirio smile wider in turn despite how his face felt about ready to rip at the motion of it. He raised his hands in front of himself in a mock show of surrender, not taking the pen and paper as he began to splutter out a denial. But Anya cut him short, pursing her lips around her cigarette. "Eri tells me about you," she said, less unconfident about her Japanese though it continued to be disjointed. "I know. _I know_." And then, more pointedly, "What do you want?"

"Ah! You know Eri?" He cocked his head, taking the pen and paper while hoping his hands didn't shake. "What a small world! I met her at a market, you see, and she's always spoken so much about ballet, I thought it would be nice for me to–"

Anya spat something harsh and cruelly tinted in Russian. She threw her head back to drag from the cigarette, dramatic and deathly, and then shook her shoulders as though she were cold. "You must stop," she whispered. "For Eri. You _must _stop, Togata Mirio. Her husband is not kind man. Now…" she spun away, "_fuck off_," and then murmured something else in Russian. Watching her back recede into the shadow of the theater, Mirio struggled against the catch in his throat – the swell of anticlimax in all its incomplete incoherency.

* * *

Exactly as Mirio had expected, he was faced with Nighteye's speechless wrath two nights later. Sir paced up and down the hotel room. Sir shook his head and sighed – annoyed rather than resigned – while rifling through the mass of folders and documents he'd lugged along. Some recent. Some over thirteen years old. Since Mirio had fetched him from the train station, telling him in the taxi what he'd done, not a word had been spoken. Now the silence began to weigh itself like a thousand needles down Mirio's spine, his heart threatening to fall out onto the table. Insistent. Shaming. He did not bow away from Sir's occasional looks, but cringed internally, feeling like a seventeen year old boy once more.

"_Careless_," Nighteye said at last. "What's gotten into you? I know you're better than this." He pressed his fingers beneath his glasses, wrinkles gathering like crumpled wrapping at his eyes' corners. "I told you to wait and you deliberately disobeyed me. This is about much more than Eri, Togata. We cannot afford to–"

"Forgive me, Sir. But I just had to know."

"And now that you know? What do you think you can do? There's a high possibility that Overhaul is still involved in all of this – you understand that, don't you? _What are you going to do _now that you know?"

Beneath Sir's slithering dismay, Mirio recognised pity. An all too familiar pity, worse than anyone's disappointment or anger. Too scolding, too raw against long-closed scars. At last, Mirio hung his head, if only to escape that look in Nighteye's eyes.

"I don't know."

"You say Ivanovska Anya mentioned both Eri and her husband to you directly?"

Mirio nodded.

Sir paused, brooding, and then sat down on the cushion across from Mirio. He poured himself a cup from the sake bottle, drinking deeply. "You won't like it, but we need to acknowledge an obvious possibility. Before it catches us off-guard." He held Mirio's gaze, perhaps realising how desperately Mirio wanted to block his ears. "I believe Overhaul might have married Eri off. Perhaps to one of his cohorts in the Russian Mafia. It presents obvious benefits to him if– I'm sorry. I know it must be hard to imagine. But Bubble Girl shares in my suspicions."

Swallowing sake to quell the nightmarish twist in his organs, Mirio narrowed his eyes at nothing. Everything inside of him had known it. That all of this – that she – was too good to be true. All the restlessness. All the careful slowness about her words and movements and glances and… She knew he knew. She knew he didn't want to know.

Look at him now! Even less of a hero than thirteen years ago when he hadn't been much of a hero to begin with. Who was he to long for the name Lemillion when he couldn't do something so crucial as face the truth? The possibility that a little girl, a beautiful woman – and no stranger now either: a woman he adored and cared for and had held in his arms as though she were glass and his entire world all at once – was in danger? Was being hurt and used as though she were just a _thing_!

Mirio hung his head in his hands, ashamed of himself. "I wanted to save her this time."

"I know."

"I still can."

"Mirio–"

A knock. Two. Three. Fairy-light and greedy in their quickness. Nighteye shot his head upon his shoulders to look at the door in surprise. Mirio too, though he could barely keep himself upright with how his heart stammered. He knew those knocks.

"Who in the world comes looking for you at midnight?"

He was up too soon to answer the question, flinging himself for the door and not caring that he looked a mess. That his breath probably smelled strongly now of sake and that he was virtually on the brink of tears. And sure enough – there she was in heart-stopping, stunning solidity. White hair in a tumbling ponytail and that flowery skirt Mirio loved so much. Eri blinked up at him, her cheeks and lips an exquisite shade of rose. And oh, when she said his name in that soft, questioning way! And ah, when she parted those pink lips into a cautious smile! He stared, floored by the shock of it – seeing her just then, when he was only supposed to be receiving her call the next night. Everything was skewed and glorious. Everything was jolting in its wrongness.

Feeling Nighteye's consuming gaze, Mirio ushered Eri out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him. "What are you doing here? I thought–"

"I had a chance," Eri said, and balled her fists in front of herself like a child. "And I wanted… I _needed _to come. To ask you something important."

"At midnight, Eri-chan?"

"I'm sorry." Her cheeks grew splotched with deeper red. "I'm sorry. It's late, I know. But I realised something, you see, and I haven't been able to sleep for days now because… because Mirio, I–"

"Hello there." Like some tall, terrible apparition, Nighteye was in the doorway without having made a sound, glancing casually between Eri and Mirio like any ordinary visitor. "You must be Eri."

Things went quiet. Quiet and strained, the blush upon Eri's face greying into ash. She and Nighteye watched each other with a confusion of expressions, her features dropping from a coy urgency to confusion to fear. Absolute, undeniable fear which should not have been so quick to home itself upon her face. But why? _Why fear_? Mirio could not shake the feeling that he had betrayed some delicate trust between them, their secrecy now shattered and the holiness of their nighttime hours now violated.

Fingers touching themselves to her arm, Mirio tried wordlessly to reassure her and himself. He was surprised (maybe hurt?) by the way she shuddered away from him, as though being roused suddenly and painfully from a daydream.

"This is my boss, Eri-chan," he said, reminding himself that Eri had never met Nighteye before. "You remember? He's the one I was telling you about the other day."

"_Boss_," Eri repeated quietly.

"It's lovely to meet you." Nighteye did a polite bow in the doorway. "Togata has told me much about you."

Eri turned her red, apple sweet eyes onto Mirio. And indeed, there was a tinge of betrayal to their shade. "I didn't know," she said, wide eyed and spooked. "I'm sorry." She turned. "I didn't know." And then she was off in an unsteady sprint down the corridor, like a doe only just finding its legs. Ignoring how Mirio called her name, not feeling in tender ghosts how he reached out in hopes of catching her.

He too was running before he could stop himself. Forgetting entirely how Sir watched from the room. Forgetting how to tell his legs to stop. Out of control. He was out of practice of being in control – perhaps that was what happened after thirteen years of feeling like there was no such thing.

Only glimpsing flashes of her hair around corners and listening hard to the _tap-tap-tap-tap _of her feet along the carpeted hallways, Mirio did not relent in his chase.

Heart pounding. Heat rising to his face.

The only reason he managed to catch up was that Eri paused at the door to throw her shoes on, too well-mannered for her own good. And outside, along the stone path and amongst the hydrangeas which led themselves in fluorescent blues to the gate, he wrapped his arm around her waist and held her fast. Though she beat her little hands against him, though he could feel her pulse hike with each harsh movement, he held her there and pressed his face into the top of her head. Apologising. Not knowing what for. He released her when she calmed down again – but not entirely, for fear that she should try to flee from nothing once again.

"You weren't supposed to tell anyone," she whimpered, out of breath as a bird having jumped from its nest for the first time. "You promised. I shouldn't have come – _I shouldn't've_. Now he's going to come and he's going to–"

"Who, Eri?" Gently, Mirio turned her to look at him. "Who's going to come?"

She gasped, and shook her head upon her shoulders, looking aghast and fretfully pale and dewy with tears in her eyes. The little horn was so small beneath her hair now. Could it really have been so? And she was so real, so warm and alive, beneath Mirio's hands. It couldn't have really been the case, could it? But it was, and it was, and it was. Mirio's fingers trembled as he lifted them to her cheeks, and he felt his own breath burn in his lungs as he cocooned her face in his palms.

Nothing would hurt her. He wouldn't let anything hurt her. He told her so and watched her lip quiver. _Nothing will hurt you as long as I'm here, Eri. I promise_. Bemused and lost in a self-conscious daze, he touched his thumb to her bottom lip's softness. Pulling her close, cursing the unfairness of it all. The agony in his chest at seeing her so painfully close and free but not-free. She wasn't a thing. She wasn't something that could be another man's or his. So why was it so hard not to ask her to be his?

"I'm sorry. I know I promised," he whispered.

"This isn't about me."

"It's always been about you, Eri."

"No. Mirio, please."

No sound. No colour or sensation. Nothing other than her as Mirio bowed his head and touched her lips with his. Wet, and slightly cold. The lonely echo of salt like tears. It was soft, and it was not long. But god, it was an agony all its own to hold her and to kiss her. It was a beauty more sheer than terror. Numb all over except for where her fingers came to rest – on his arms, on his chest. And when he pulled away, finding her with eyes wide and clearer than any moon, he knew. It could never not be about her. Not anymore.

Her eyes closed again before his did: a delicate flutter of eyelashes to cheeks, and she fed back into the kiss with a certainty both strange and right. Her arms in puffy, white sleeves draping themselves upon his shoulders. Her waist enclosed in his hold like the blossom inside of its seed-shell. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just a slurred piece of cursive in their timeline, witnessed by the moon and etched with the tentative tremble about both their lips.

It ended quietly, Mirio planting a kiss on the tip of her nose and both her lids and the apples of her cheeks before she vanished out the gate. Still unsteady on her legs, but this time looking back over her shoulder to smile small at Mirio through the darkness.


	14. xiii

xiii.

Three nights later, they lingered over that promised glass of plum wine. Not saying much, and doing very little in the way of meeting each other's eyes. Sir was gone – not _gone-gone_ but out, perhaps in the hotel gardens or on an especially late-night walk, having agreed to make himself scarce should Eri show up. And she had. Eleven p.m. on the dot, stepping cautiously in while Sir stepped quietly out with his coat thrown over his shoulders like a cape and his wallet tucked in his pocket. He'd offered Eri a tight smile. She'd dropped her eyes in something close to shame.

Now she took tiny sips from her glass, and Mirio agonized over the motion of it. He delighted himself in the shape of her lips, and the memory of how it had felt to kiss her. It would have been too easy to ignore the obvious questions. Of all times, now Mirio would have been happiest to continue pretending that this – hiding in his hotel room together under the most secretive of darknesses – was perfectly normal. Because didn't all couples sit with bloody history between them? Didn't all couples skirt around the chasms in their chests and let the riddles mount to dangerous heights? No. There'd be none of that tonight. Sir had only left after Mirio had promised to get the truth.

Eri seemed to be expecting it. She never wore a wedding ring (Ever? Or only when she came to see Mirio?) but now the absence of it seemed more significant than ever. The wine went down slowly in her glass; it was fully on purpose. The flowers Mirio had bought – lilies and roses in shades of tangerine and saffron – remained unremarked.

Mirio clutched at the nothing in his lap, sighing loudly and saying her name. He didn't mean for it to come out so heavy-hearted. "We can't keep doing this," he said.

Eri nodded slowly, absently, and gave a quiet hum.

"But I do want to."

"That's very…" she pursed her lips, tapped the lip of the wine glass with her fingertip, "…straightforward."

"Yeah," Mirio murmured. "We haven't been very straightforward with each other until now, have we?"

"I'm sorry."

"Why do you apologise so much?"

It wasn't a fair question, of course. It was probably as much a part of her as any blood cell or scar. She could likely answer it just as well as Mirio could explain why he got so attached to things (her) so damningly hard and so unnecessarily fast. Indeed, Eri shrugged and took a small drink, looking unsure and about ready to still apologise more.

Reaching over the table to take her hand, Mirio offered his best excuse of a smile. Eri didn't pull away – she smiled back, though her lips peaked and curved in all the wrong places – and for a little while, they stayed like that. His thumb stroking little circles against hers, the air full and swelling ever more with an inevitable crash-landing into reality. Chest bruised purple with feeling, Mirio could scarcely decide whether or not this was the cruelest trick fate could ever have played on him.

"There's something I have to ask you," he said at last. "It's… not an easy question… for either of us, I don't think. But could you be honest with me? Eri?"

"Do– I–" She chewed her words. "Ask me what? What's it about?"

"Will you tell me the truth?"

"I don't know."

She had to.

Mirio squeezed her hand tighter, and spoke through gritted teeth. "Please. Tell me what happened to you." No, that was too easy. "Tell me… if– I mean…" What was he supposed to be asking her exactly? "Who is your husband? And that man from the market. Who was _he_?"

There was no surprise in her expression. Really, there was nothing: just two red eyes and a hard line for a mouth, pale and empty and swallowing down on shapeless words. She pulled her hand out from Mirio's carefully, and clung to her wine glass. "I can't–"

"Did Overhaul make you marry somebody you didn't want to?" Mirio tried to be gentle. "Is he behind this? All this time, I've been trying to convince myself that you escaped. That you were rescued. But you weren't, were you? Is– is Overhaul–?"

"No," Eri said. "He isn't. Kai isn't… I swear…"

"Kai?"

She stopped. She stared.

Something was around the corner, waiting to sink its claws into Mirio. Everything drained from him, and by some force of autopilot, he asked again, "Who is your husband, Eri?"

And she repeated it. His name. Some preyful instinct of her own. "_Kai_."

Oh. "Oh." Oh god.

"I'm so sorry, Mirio."

"No. No, it's not your fault. You have nothing to be sorry for right now."

If ever there was a time to be sick, now was not it. Numbly, Mirio sank his face into his hands and tried to focus on something – his breathing, Eri's breathing, the taste of the wine as it faded from his tongue. Somehow, it was a very dull feeling. Like the moment after being hit through the ribs with a mallet. Surreal. Spinning. And in the unsteadiness, Mirio found a little voice in the back of his head trying to convince him that it wasn't that bad.

"It's not your fault," he repeated.

It wasn't that bad – Eri was real, and whole, and healthy. It was more than a younger Mirio had ever thought he'd get. But then again, was she really so whole? She shrunk away at the slightest touches and jumped at the faintest noises. And from her lips, there was always those _sorries_. Nobody whole would have been so sorry for nothing all the time.

Dragging his palms down his cheeks, Mirio considered Eri again. "Is he still hurting you? Still making those bullets?"

Eri shook her head.

"_Really_?"

"He stopped a long time ago," she murmured. "He doesn't hurt me." A pause. She balanced her lips on the wine glass for a long time without seeming to drink anything. "I promise."

Mirio sipped deeply from his own wine. "What about the bullets?"

"In Russia."

"In Russia?"

"He left them all there."

"Eri." In a queasy, confused stride, Mirio had risen from his own cushion and crouched now at her side. His hands went to her cheeks so that she wouldn't be able to look away, wouldn't be able to hide the watery glimmers through her eyes. "You're scared. I can see you're scared – but we can help you. Sir and me. Even Deku. You remember Deku? We'll be able to get you away from Overhaul this time. Is he here with you? In Kagoshima? We'll arrest him. He won't be able–"

"_Arrest_?" Eri choked. "But he left everything in Russia. I said he doesn't hurt me anymore. You can't arrest him. You can't!"

"Yes, we can."

"But everything is _okay _now!" She squirmed out from Mirio's hold to throw her arms around his neck. Breathing hard like a stunned doe, grasping at his hair as though it were the only thing left of him for her to have. "Please don't do it. Not again. Not again. He hasn't done anything wrong." She said it like she believed it. "I deserve everything." She said it like she believed it. "I deserve it!"

There were tears down Mirio's cheeks. Not hers. His. Mysterious and unexpected, and they left wet scrapes along Eri's skin as Mirio twisted himself away and back again to kiss her. One hand in her nape, the other arm encircling her waist to hold her as close to him as either of them could possibly manage or bear. His lips were wet too, and heavy, and shaking against hers, and though Mirio was not in any way religious, he imagined some invisible entity in the room with them. Watching. A silent witness to a guilt neither of them could quite confess with words.

Because they were both guilty and not in their own ways. Eri didn't deserve what had happened to her – she didn't, she didn't! – and her guilt was by no guilt of her own. But Mirio… he knew he had only himself to blame for the way he felt.

Eri pulled away, her fingertips tracing lines alongside Mirio's tears. "Why… Why are you crying?"

"You already know."

She was quiet for a moment. "Yes."

"You feel it too."

"I do."

He put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on the mouth once more. Gently, he took away the scarf – the one with the pink and blue, his favourite – and pulled the neckline of her shirt from her collar bone. A jutting balcony, a deep ivory groove: he placed his lips there next, and let Eri's hair fall in steep dips between his fingers as he brushed them along the back of her head. So close now, she swallowed against nothing, the column of her throat rising and falling sharply.

Not moving from the nook of her shoulder but pausing in his kiss, Mirio spoke lowly into her skin, "Is this okay?"

She nodded.

"And this?" His hand travelled down her arm. Back again, easing the loose sleeve up along her forearm.

She held her breath, but nodded again, and made a sort of falling whimper when Mirio brought her wrist to his lips. There were scars he wouldn't ask about because he already knew the answer. There were more of them in this little sliver of her than he could have stomached to count. But in no rush, he kissed each of them from her fingers to her elbow. Committing the rubbery, raised texture to memory, as well as the rising heat of rage and something else – something much warmer, more full-bodied – as it quivered into his stomach.

Eri's free hand balanced itself precariously against his chest, flattening into a white star before retreating onto her fingertips. She grazed them down the front of his t-shirt. There was a hitch in her breathing which made Mirio greedier than he should have been, and he sighed when she slipped her touch out of sight and onto his stomach's bare skin. Like a child exploring a sandpit, she hesitated, touched a little further, moved her fingers between the fine trail of hair beneath his navel.

Then, gasping as though shocked, Eri withdrew her hand in a quick, light gust; she looked at Mirio apologetically.

"Do you want this, Eri?" There was a certain hopelessness to the words. But still, Mirio leaned in, pressed his forehead to hers. "Nothing needs to happen if you don't want it to."

"Really?"

"I promise."

They were motionless. Eri's hands lingered in an uncertain drift about her lap and Mirio's, and she stared at them as though they did not belong to her. There should have been something absurd about being so close and so still, not quite strangers, almost friends, disembodied from any history or purpose. But there was nothing absurd about it. When at last Eri looked at Mirio, not speaking but saying enough for the moment, it was with a strange and familiar knowing.

Her hands, trembling and slow, took his and guided them. First across her cheeks like he'd done so many times before. Then down to her chest, where the skin was delicately stretched over bone, to her breasts, which were small and finer than china under Mirio's palms. She blushed a dewy, shallow pink, but didn't make Mirio stop as he stroked her softly through her shirt's material.

Across the expanse of her ribcage into the dips of her waist. From her waist to the dents of her hipbones; deeper, lower, slower still until Eri bit her lip and shut her eyes, Mirio's fingers beginning to wander cautiously. Slipping into her thighs. Cupping her through her skirt – white and airy. He watched carefully the twitches and tenses of her fingers as she smoothed them over the back of his hand, and he began to work her between her legs. More softly, more anxiously than he'd ever done before, until she murmured his name in a soft, pained sigh.

"I want to touch you properly," he said, lips now tracing across her ear.

She hummed. He drew her skirt up along her legs – oh, were they beautiful, and marred as her arm – and running his eyes over their whiteness, pressed his fingertips back to where they'd been. Massaging. Circling. Thumbing and making Eri's spine go stiff, making her gasp against a confused, pained moan. She leaned onto one hand, and dug the other back into Mirio's hair.

He did it again. And again. Groaning himself against the dampness which spread across his fingers.

"M-Mirio…"

Everything inside of him felt too tight, too hot and anxious to escape. Sweat was across his forehead. Eri had slung both her arms around him now and was quivering. Swallowing delicate noises Mirio was close to begging for. He wanted his name on her lips. He wanted her clothing across the floor and her body in his arms. His fingers were beneath her underwear now, and desperately caressing the wet, silky feeling of her. Oh god, _her_.

He wanted her–

"Wait. Wait, stop."

He froze.

And retreated, suddenly shuddering under Eri's hazy, bemused stare.

"What's wrong?" he questioned, his hands sliding slowly away along her thighs. "Are you okay?"

She kissed him, quick and light as a feather. Once. Twice again on his lips, then each of his cheeks where his tears were only just beginning to dry. Like a bud in reverse, her legs closed and disappeared back beneath her skirt's thin fabric. "It's a lot," she said, sad-happy. "It's just a little too much."

"But a good too much?"

She nodded, and sniffed. "I have to go now."

"No, Eri." He hugged her, and willed away the shuddering weakness throughout his limbs. "Please stay with me."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I'll come back."

"When?"

Another kiss, longer this time, and with promise. "Please wait for me. I'll stay. But not yet."


	15. xiv

xiv.

When Eri told Anya about Mirio, there under the magnolia tree, she'd initially been overwhelmed by a dazzling sense of relief – perhaps because to say it had made it real, to have shared the secret made it feel a little less dirty; or perhaps it was because Anya hadn't warned her off. Indeed, she'd sighed mournfully, and had kissed the top of Eri's head with a full, brooding mouth. "He sounds like very gentle man," she'd said. "You like him very much, I can tell." But she hadn't told Eri to stop. And she hadn't told Eri it was bad. And if Anya didn't disagree, then Eri wouldn't either.

It was in the hours that followed, however, that the terror set in. Relief gave way to a smoldering in her ribcage, and a flapping in her skull. What if Anya told Chrono? She would, wouldn't she? Because nothing was ever safe if it didn't stay hidden in Eri's heart.

She'd gasped for oxygen all through her dreams in the night, and had hidden herself in the bathroom for as long as she could possibly manage the next morning. She hadn't looked at Chrono, petrified. She had stayed as far away from Kai as he'd allow, ashamed and disgusted. She'd been so stupid. She'd known one wrong move would make everything come crumbling. And she'd never see blue sky again. And she'd never see Mirio again. And Kai would probably break so many of her bones and so well that even he wouldn't be able to put her back together.

But nothing came. Neither Chrono nor Kai had looked at her, spoke to her, treated her any differently.

And when Kai disappeared to a last-minute meeting a few nights later, when Chrono told Eri to go to bed because Kai would only be back in the morning, every one of her anxieties had spilled into a glowing, quivering, inexplicable euphoria. Anya was right, of course - she, Eri, liked Mirio very much. She wanted to see him very much. So she'd gone and she'd done it.

The rest of the week was history, engraved onto Eri's lips and skin and somewhere deep inside of her. Some_thing_ deep inside of her, which until now had been curled away and very, very quiet.

She'd thought about it constantly since getting home the previous night.

She thought about it now, picking out apples at the market. Chrono was carrying the basket, already filled with dark leaves and vegetables which had never looked so unappetizing. He chose tomatoes from their box, next to the radishes and in front of the potatoes. He _always_ chose the tomatoes – and maybe it was because Anya loved tomatoes, and ate them like they were delicacies. Did he think of her? Did he pretend he was choosing them for her?

For reasons she couldn't decide upon, Eri blushed.

Chrono bought her taiyaki when they were finished shopping, and they sat at the usual table by the dock to eat. The dough tasted blander than usual. The sweetness was not as sweet as usual.

"You've been very quiet today," Chrono said, sounding strange. Stranger than usual.

Eri shrugged.

"Are you missing Anya?"

"I always miss her."

Chrono hummed.

He'd probably missed her every day for… how long had Anya said it had been? _Eight years. _And how many days were there in eight years? How many nights? Eri had never been all that good at math – no matter how the Russians had tried to teach her – but still she tried to work it out, hoping numbers would dilute the idea of Chrono and Anya having held, touched, said each other's names however many times over _eight years_. More than that, Eri hoped it would dilute the thought of how Mirio's hand had felt down where even Kai's hand very rarely went.

She shivered, and Chrono noticed, raising his eyebrows, clearing his throat as though to speak but then saying nothing.

Both of them chewed awkwardly through their taiyaki until there was nothing left. Their baskets waited to be taken home. Seagulls flapped over head in gangly, clumsy patterns, and Eri looked over the blanket-ruffled water of the dock. There were tapping fingers atop the table, and fidgeting hands, and more throat-clearing. They could have left. They should have, Kai would probably be waiting for them.

But Chrono made no move to move, and so neither did Eri.

"I've been wanting to talk to you, Eri-chan," he said eventually, soft. "Anya… thinks it would be a good idea…"

"What?"

"She told me…" He paused and pursed his lips into a thin line, mask hanging about his neck limply. "She told me you know."

"Oh." Eri felt her face drop. Growing pale. Growing horrified. "_Oh_."

"I know you probably–"

"What did she say? _Exactly_?"

He seemed to struggle with the words. It was peculiar, seeing him look so uncomfortable. "I know you probably have some questions. You weren't supposed to find out, and Anya tells me you haven't told anyone." He meant Overhaul, but couldn't say his name in public. "Not that you can't, of course. It's not a secret." Oh, wasn't it? "But I'll answer whatever you might want to ask, Eri-chan. It's perfectly… _normal_… for you to have questions."

Chrono didn't squirm over things. If anything, Chrono was even less queasy than Kai was. So for him to look so uneasy was odd, maybe a little upsetting but not really. If nothing else, and if Eri was being honest with herself, it brought with it a sneaking sense of thrill.

"I don't have questions," she said.

And Chrono looked relieved. "Alright. That's quite alright too."

"But…"

"_But_?"

The something deep inside of Eri roused itself, and she thought again of Mirio. Of how good it had felt for him to touch her, and so wrong in some very right way: wrong in its not-so-wrongness, the best kind of wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That must have been how Chrono and Anya felt; that must have been why they'd clung onto each other so desperately, like two vines around a tree.

Blushing deeper now, Eri shrank into her scarf. "Actually, there is something." When Chrono didn't reply, she took it as an opening to press onwards despite how her stomach curdled. "Is it, umm, supposed to make you feel good? Or, I mean, can women like it too? You know…" Sheepishly, she lowered her voice, "…_it_."

Chrono spluttered, and the two of them stared as though they'd just stabbed each other. And now? Now what do we do? Indeed, Eri realised the absurdity of talking to Chrono like this. Even being her primary source of knowledge on the world, he'd never been the one to teach her about these kinds of things. Because what did he know about talking to a girl about her body, especially when that body had never been hers to understand? Eri had always accepted knowing only what books showed her, and what Anya told her, and what Kai did to her.

But now she needed someone to answer her questions, and for the something deep inside of her to make some sense.

"I meant questions about Anya and me," Chrono said eventually.

Eri knew that. But Anya had already told her everything she wanted to know – which, admittedly, was not much (flashing back to Chrono's bum was hilarious and hideous enough as it was) – and now she only had questions entirely her own. Despite how heat throbbed to life in her cheeks, Eri looked at Chrono dead-on. "Is it _supposed_ to feel _good_ though?"

Chrono rubbed his nape, and pulled a face that made it look like he was trying not to pull a face. "Yes. It should feel good."

"For a woman too?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"Do I look like a woman to you, Eri?"

Swallowing a mouthful of salty air, Eri gaped. He didn't look mad but he didn't look particularly happy either, slightly red and thin-eyed as he tugged his mask back into place. And Eri didn't want to be the reason Chrono was unhappy. The heat receded from her cheeks, and she was about to apologise before the thought even occurred to her that she should – or maybe not, since Mirio had pointed out she apologised too much.

However, Chrono spoke first. "Come. Let's go home. I'll see if I can, uh, explain."

* * *

After unpacking the groceries onto the kitchen counter, Eri rushed to shower. Kai had locked himself in his study, maybe asleep, maybe half-asleep, so she didn't need to greet him. She didn't need to wear nice clothes for him either, since he'd probably be too tired to care about her whenever he emerged. So after scrubbing herself clean and massaging disinfectant into her skin, she threw on her pajamas even though it was hardly the middle of the day. Big, puffy pants to hide the way her legs were shaking. A sweater, because their house was always freezing cold, and because she wanted to preserve as much as possible the warm niggle low in her stomach.

And then off she scurried to Chrono's study in too much of a hurry, bare feet tapping across the floor quick and greedy.

He was already at his desk, and had candied nuts in a bowl on the table. He was skittishly quick in closing his laptop when she knocked at the door. A seat from the dining room had been pulled up next to him; he made an awkward gesture for Eri to sit, and offered her a mug of green tea. He had a coffee for himself, dark and steaming in one of the porcelain mugs – Eri could smell it, a strange and sharp undertone unusual for coffee.

"Are you comfortable?"

"Yes."

"Is your tea too hot?"

"No."

"Okay, well." He tapped his fingers across the desk, looking too somber. "Well – when a man and a woman are attracted to each other, sometimes they might want to show it by–"

Eri pouted, was shocked to find herself crinkling her nose at him. "No, Kurono-san, I know what _it_ is."

"Don't give me cheek, Eri. I'm getting to your question. I have to build context first."

"Sorry."

She sat back in her chair – a farcical attempt to make herself comfortable while her face continued to burn and Chrono spoke flatly, too factually, giving her unnecessary rundowns of biology (which books already did well enough themselves) and dry explanations of what-went-where (which books also did well enough, and which made Eri nauseous). But long-suffering as she was, she sat through his 'context'. Maybe he was still confusing her with a little girl. It was possible that now, he was trying to make up for what he'd never taught Eri as a teenager. Was it always this weird, being taught? Anya had never made it so weird. Kai never made it so weird – painful, yes, but not weird.

It only got worse. Weirder and so much worse. Chrono drew up pictures on his laptop, the type one would see in doctors' rooms – unappetizing and all shades of red, somehow plastic looking – and Eri smacked her hands to her face in a delighted horror. "I don't need to see! I don't need to _see_!"

"This is just an _illustration_," Chrono said emphatically. "It'll help if you can visualize it. Don't make it weird! This isn't supposed to be weird, it's normal, it's biological. Stop blushing so much, Eri!"

"You stop blushing, Kurono-san!"

"It's just the light."

"You are," Eri giggled thinly. "You're blushing!"

He made a grudging noise, and glanced skeptically at the picture from a women's health website – '_Your Friend, the Clitoris_' it was labeled. Like the title of a children's book. "It might be easier if Overhaul – Kai – explained this to you," he said quietly. Though surely he realised the preposterousness of that. The embarrassed smile on Eri's face dropped, and Chrono continued, "He'd at least be able to help–"

Eri shook her head. "I don't want him to."

"He wouldn't mind."

"_No_."

A sigh. Chrono leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Look, Eri, I think a lot of how much a woman likes _it _has to do with how much she likes the person she's doing _it _with. And if you're wondering about these sorts of things, it must mean you're at least starting to like him, right?"

"I don't understand."

"Like I said – when a man and a woman are attracted to each other, they want to get close. What I meant is that they want to feel good, and they want to make each other feel good. Is that how you feel about Kai?"

Not in the slightest. But Eri couldn't exactly tell Chrono that, now could she?

"You're scared of him, which is also understandable… But you're very important to him, and he thinks about these things too."

Well. Yuck. "Oh. Oh, okay."

Chrono cracked an odd smile. "So in that case, wouldn't you prefer to ask him about these things?"

Blinking once, blinking twice, feeling like a small animal caught in the headlights of her own horniness (also a word the books explained well, and Eri could only assume that was the something deep inside of her) she shook her head once again. "No, thank you. I'd still like you to explain."

"But Eri–"

"Please, Kurono-san. I'd like _you _to _explain_."

As was Chrono's way, he relented – albeit with a certain groaning, eye-rolling, thin-lipped resistance – and pointed out to Eri all the important parts of female genitalia. At least according to his own knowledge and what the women's health websites said, with all their friendly headings and less-friendly pictures. There was no shortage of disclaimers from Chrono either. _But just a reminder, every woman probably likes different things, so you _(and Kai) _have to figure out what you _(and Kai) _enjoy. Okay, Eri? God, please tell me you understood that. _

Step-by-step instructions. Explanations of why the female orgasm (so it was real) was such an elusive thing. Subtle suggestions on how to broach the subject with Kai, to which Eri would simply nod politely and then pose very different questions very quickly because she would much rather think about Mirio. And every time Chrono seemed to think it was over, circling his teacher-voice into a breathless, relieved denouement, Eri would start up something new about something she'd read, or something she'd heard the Russian women talking about, or whether all of this would really work for her since her body didn't have all its 'normal' parts.

For once, Chrono didn't really know what to say to that.

All of this and more in the space of an hour; and when Kai appeared like a phantom in the doorway – "Why are you two whispering like this?" – Chrono made a sound as though he was having a seizure, and almost punched his laptop through the screen.

* * *

**A/N: Not going to lie, I think this was one of the weirdest things I've ever written. XD **

**On a similar vein... A warning - next chapter, rating will be changing to M. Thankie! Follow, favourite and review. xx**


	16. xv

**A/N: A warning once again. There's a severe case of the naughties beginning about halfway through the chapter. Proceed with caution.**

* * *

xv_._

After that, looking Chrono in the eye was hard. Shameful, even. Eri couldn't shake the feeling that she'd trusted him with a part of herself – albeit one very new, but still very raw – and now that the moment was over, now that Chrono smiled between her and Kai with a small, suggestive knowing, it seemed she'd violated the sanctity of this new and raw something. It had been hers, hers alone. Now, by a delicately established dependence, she'd made it Chrono's too. And he expected her to make it Kai's as well.

Eri couldn't exactly blame him for it – the sense of betrayal wasn't fair, because technically she wanted him to think these feelings were for Kai; and technically, it was better if everybody stayed fooled. Maybe she could even fool herself a little bit, and so make the whole secret just that much safer.

It floated about the dinner table that evening, an ominous and glaring specter which only Eri seemed to notice. It followed Chrono and Kai into the basement that night; and no matter how Eri tried to eavesdrop, she only heard it hissing back at her like static, disguising Chrono and Kai's low and clandestine voices. They were talking about her, probably, but they always spoke about her: her, and bullets, and business, and unravelling plans, and how much they hated working with the Russians. The shadowy quietness of their conversation was nothing new, and Eri tried to assuage her uneasiness by reminding herself of it.

And later, when Kai came to bed, she tried to tell herself that the way he seated himself precariously on her side of the mattress was also nothing out of the ordinary.

She was still awake, and for a tremulous few moments the two of them stared at each other. Kai, unreadable. Eri hoping she was equally so. His eyes' golds bore into her through their bedroom's darkness, searching for something in the same way they always did – only now, with a certain difference, a docility Eri couldn't place or believe. A long time went by. A long, long time of very strange, very confusing silence. Timidly, Eri pushed herself to sit and, in a charmed, brave moment, brought her face close to Kai's.

His voice was soft through the mask. "Will you tell me what you and Kurono were talking about earlier?"

It made Eri feel a little more daring than she should have been. "Nothing," she said. "It was nothing."

"Nothing. I see."

There was a Russian saying – _the nose of curious Barbara was torn off at the market _– which had been played on repeat to Eri when she'd been younger. And indeed, she knew it well. Her nose had been torn off many times before. Yet somehow still, against all the odds of punishment and isolation, she'd almost always gotten answers in the end. Her curiosity was almost always fed, unlike curious Barbara, and though she didn't have the luxury of being greedy she did have excuse enough to try her luck.

Just as she'd done earlier with Chrono. Just as she did now, lifting a finger and tucking it into the edge of Kai's mask. Pulling down, slowly, with false tenderness, to expose the carved ridge of his nose, the perilous bow of his lips.

The gentleness of it was bold. The clean, familiar taste of his mouth was exciting and sickening all at once. Eri kissed him, her lips on his lips for a while longer than usual, and Kai let it happen as though the motion were some foreign, paralyzing magic. He touched a gloved hand probingly to her cheek, her neck. His breath slid against her lips in a mess of hot-cold air. For him to kiss her was rare – and for it, Eri had always been grateful, because it left her mouth burning and her bones hollow. But somehow, this time, she was able to pretend that it wasn't so bad. That she even wanted it.

Although maybe it had to do with the fact that she was also pretending the man she was kissing wasn't Kai at all.

* * *

The next three days bristled with an inexplicable impatience. Chrono's words circled through Eri's brain intrusively and obsessively – she woke up in the morning with a heat on her chest and a knot in her stomach; she stared down at herself in the bath through an abashed, eager fugue, marveling at the new sensation of hot water against her skin; she repeated the words to herself when she was awake at night. _Circular motions_ was what all the websites had said, what Chrono had read aloud so chokedly. _Circular motions at first, then faster and more concentrated._

When she'd finally mustered the courage to actually try it, her fingers had felt clumsy and thick. Like vines not knowing where to go. Not knowing what feeling good was actually supposed to feel like. The explanations had made it sound so easy, and in frustration Eri had quickly given up. Embarrassed despite there being no one to be embarrassed in front of, and disappointed with herself for having absolutely no idea – even now, after that whole tip-toe with Chrono – what to do. It was supposed to be normal. Biological. Instinctual. Mirio had done it so… nicely. Yet, Eri could not banish the self-conscious sense of absurdity in sticking her hand where hands weren't supposed to be.

And then there was Kai.

There was this: Eri knew him. Eri knew, whether she wanted to or not, his ins and outs as though they were her own – because after years of watching his every move, learning him with the oversensitivity of how a rabbit learns a fox, every inch of Chisaki Kai had been ingrained onto her like a tattoo. Through burning habit, she paid very close attention to the way his secrets unraveled themselves, to the way his soul ripped through his skin in a million unspoken ways. And never had she been more aware of it than now.

Now that she deliberately put on the perfume he liked – the one which smelled of lotus blossoms – and now that she purposefully started to wear the dresses he'd bought for her – ruffles around her chest, sashes in her waist, all very grown up and womanly, and always succeeding in making his eyes dim to a shade like molten black-gold.

None of it was for him, of course. The ritual of washing, and dressing up, and acting sweet – even though it was all done exactly the way he would have wanted, none of the images in Eri's head were of Kai when she scrubbed herself clean or spritzed perfume onto her skin. Kai would writhe, _of_ _course_, as Eri had seen him do so many times before. And the idea made her dizzy. She didn't want _him _to writhe for her. But still, without fully intending to and at the same time intending it exactly, she did all the right things at all the right times and places.

* * *

That evening, she picked the yellow dress dotted with white flowers. It was one of the few which wasn't long, just barely reaching the middle of her thighs, and to see herself in the mirror was odd. The scars on her legs were exposed and loud: a gruesome, fleshy pink compared to her paleness, and for all the world to see (all the world being Kai and Chrono, and maybe the two maids). Eri second-guessed it while she did and re-did her hair at the dressing table, avoiding the all-knowing, all-judging eye of her matryoshka doll.

Its many-layered body pregnant with treasures.

Eventually, one of the maids came poking – a mousy, inconspicuous head around the door, murmuring, "Dinner is ready, Chisaki-sama…" – and Eri's body moved through a sheer burst of electric rush, fizzles up and down her spine with a new anticipation.

Kai and Chrono were both eating already, passing a bottle of sake between themselves when Eri got to the dining room. A plate of chicken stir fry had been dished up for her, next to Kai rather than her usual place at the end of the table. Also a glass of pale apple juice. Only, when Eri sat and sipped, excruciatingly aware of Kai's eyes flickering towards her and then away again wordlessly, she was horrified and delighted to find that it was not apple juice at all, but wine. Wine like sour sugar down her palette, shocking in its burn.

Chrono watched her, and pretended to talk as easily as always. Kai watched her, and pretended to talk back as clearly as always. Eri imagined her ghost into the corner of the room and watched herself, fascinated and disgusted by how Kai's fingers grazed the skin of her thigh under the table. So feather-light it should have gone unnoticed. But the touch burned tracks into Eri's flesh, and left her shivering full and sensitive and wanting more when he stopped. It was hard to eat, and for the majority of the hour she only pushed her food around with chopsticks; so too, she could hardly bring herself to drink more than a few sips of her wine. Her throat was closed. Her stomach ached.

When Chrono left the table, Kai was quick to point it out. "Something wrong?"

Eri shook her head.

"You hardly touched your food."

"I'm not very hungry."

"Oh, aren't you?"

When Eri didn't reply, Kai twisted himself upon the cushion towards her – eyes hard, fingers stretching and clawing against his thigh. The look frightened Eri, made a black claw rise out from her ribcage into her throat as she imagined pinpricks over all the places he scraped with his gaze. But she didn't shy away. Not after all this. On the contrary, in an uncharacteristic moment of bravery which made Kai raise his eyebrows, Eri turned herself to meet him head-on and return his stare.

Every inch of her started to tremble. She tried to hold her breath, pushing down the pang which extended through her veins while also relishing it: the expectation with which her heart pummeled itself, the adrenaline in such a small act of defiance. She saw it in his eyes, in their rigid darkness – he was writhing. It made her insides die and bloom. It made her feel. Not desire. Not for him. But something so close, it teetered on pain: power.

She, Eri, had power. And for the first time, _he _– Chisaki Kai, Overhaul – was right where _she_ wanted him.

But it came with its own level of terror. Seeping into her thrill and strangling like an ivy.

He'd looked at her like this so many times before. Ghosting illusions of his hands made her blood run cold, made her freeze before him as she recalled how it had felt the first time. _The first time_. How much it had hurt, as though her innards had turned in on themselves like socks, and how she'd dreamed about his hot, breathy moans in her ear for weeks afterwards. She didn't want him. She wanted this, but not him.

"Eri."

"Mmm?"

Before she could pull away, his hand was on her hip, and she was grateful for her petrified stillness – it meant she wouldn't give him the upper hand, she couldn't struggle and relinquish her thin sliver of control.

Kai squeezed, something demanding and frustrated. "Go brush your teeth. Then come to my study." Then he was up, and without dropping his eyes towards her once again, he left the dining room.

* * *

The only light was from the lamp on his desk. For a while, Eri stood silent in the doorway. Watching his back. Willing back the daring which quickly leaked away. She still quivered, and the feeling was delicious and terrible, a devilish cocktail of the things that had made her toss hopelessly in her bed these past few nights. She fingered at her dress, pulling at the folds around her waist and wondering if maybe she could delay just a little longer. He hadn't seen her yet. There was still time–

Without looking around, Kai said her name. The sound of it came as a deep slice to Eri's core in all its honeyed darkness, and she moved out of a habit of fear. But no. To be afraid now would ruin everything – she took purposeful, slow steps despite the sudden limpness about her body; she held her shoulders back, set herself straight even though she would have been perfectly fine to have curled up into whatever grave she was digging for herself.

More than anything, she tried – tried hard, though without entirely succeeding – to pretend that the man waiting for her wasn't Kai.

In a swift movement, he stood from his chair and was facing her. Glowing eyes staring down, locked and glinting black over his bedtime mask. "What are you trying to do?"

Eri's chest ached with her ragged breaths. "I… just… thought you might like this."

"_This_?" Kai questioned, trailing his eyes suspiciously. She saw how his gloved hands clenched and opened and clenched again at his sides. She saw through the mask how his lips twisted.

What was _this_? Even now, Eri wasn't entirely sure. Curiosity. Barbara getting her nose torn off. Longing – longing for an idea which until now hadn't even existed in her mind. And as Eri forced herself to meet Kai's gaze, taking a small step closer and considering with every ounce of willingness how the air seemed to grow tight around them, she mustered every ounce of insolence and innocence-lost she could bear to bare.

"Me," she said.

He watched her. Watched her like a snake watched its prey. A creeping uncertainty, a hesitation in the way he raised an eyebrow at her.

It was quiet, and Eri became agonizingly aware of all the things she wanted to do – to try – playing through her mind in a speeding film of images and sounds and sensations. _Circular motions. Slow at first, but then faster and more concentrated_. The euphoria of the women in books, over which Eri had stewed and analysed: the fluttering, earth-shattering, stomach-churning niceness. And most of all, Mirio. How his kiss had made her tremble in ways she'd never trembled before – good ways, like butterflies down her skin. Mirio.

Mirio, Mirio, oh god, Mirio.

She shook when there was a snaking of fingers down her shoulder, and she crashed back to the clinical dimness of Kai's study. Back to the weight of Kai's golden eyes burning into her. His body closer now, his finger hooking around the sleeve of her dress and pulling it off from over her collar bone. Slowly. Painfully slow, slow, slow. And with the same slowness, he used his other finger to pull down his mask.

He slipped his face into her neck, smelling at first. A deep, steady sniff, something that had never seemed so animal before now – now that Eri could think how Mirio never _smelled _her like this. And then Kai's lips were light behind her ear, down along her jaw and the ridges of her neck in fleeting softness. One hand cupping her naked shoulder, the other clawing itself around her hip to pull her into him. Eri arched her back, half an attempt to cringe away, half in hopes of pushing herself deeper. Deeper, so that she could sink and disappear. No. Deeper, so that she could pretend for a moment that she wasn't absolutely disgusted and terrified, and that this wasn't Kai. This wasn't Kai.

Already, through the folds of her dress and the thick material of his pants, Eri could feel that nauseating, familiar bulge. He pressed her against it, and with the slightest of rocking movements he ground his hips into Eri's. He continued to press his lips into the hollows of her neck, down into her collarbones where he parted his lips and – with a suddenness that made Eri jolt in his grasp – sank his teeth around the shape of the bone.

It wasn't Kai.

And if it wasn't Kai, it almost felt good.

Good enough to make Eri moan quietly.

And reminding herself that this was what she wanted – this, but not him, and it was fine to pretend it wasn't him – she lifted her hand tentatively. Shaking with the vigour of a dried leaf in autumn wind. With the same slowness as he sucked on her neck's flesh, she lifted her hand and softly, uncertainly, cupped her palm around the absurd swelling in his groin. It was almost larger than her palm. The shape like a bowl, and hard and hot. Eri only had the vaguest semblance of an idea of what to do now – she rubbed, lightly, so lightly she was sure Kai probably wouldn't feel anything.

But his frame went rock solidly stiff. His lips paused in their path over her neck. Eri touched him with an inkling more pressure, and he made a breathy noise into her skin.

Then his hand was around her wrist in a harsh grasp, and with just the right flick he could have broken her bones. Eri, trance jolted, made a movement to rip away. But Kai held her there, and pulled her right back to where she'd been. Trembling, gasping for a breath she didn't need, she stared terrified into the blazing shade of his eyes as he narrowed them. She'd done something wrong. She'd done something bad. Eri waited for her legs to crumble beneath her, and for him to hurt her.

But nothing came. Only Kai's hand moving hers back over his hardness, and then his palm flattening to make hers stroke with greater pressure.

"Harder, Eri."

Bemused, she went harder, feeling her heart rise into her throat as she did so. Feeling a pleasant pooling of warmth somewhere low within herself as Kai – no, not him – groaned.

His hands moved with practiced deftness to unzip her dress. It gathered at her feet in yellow waves like water or silk, vivid and strange. Still with her hand against him, feeling the swell grow greater with each movement, Eri gawked down at her near-nakedness. The study air bit at her skin, the cleanly chill welcome against her own flustered heat. Her nipples beneath the flimsy bra of lace were pricked hard and sensitive – he took his breasts in her hands, flat in their gloved texture, and gently rubbed, stroked, kneaded. And at the feeling, even the sight, a throbbing mounted between Eri's legs.

Before she could stop it, her bra was gone.

Before she had a chance to fully realise how, Kai had picked her up and seated her on his desk. Her legs spread. He leaning into her, hands flat and shaking – he was shaking? – against her thighs.

He kissed her on the lips: forced his mouth against hers, hard and demanding, and soon his teeth were raw along Eri's with the shrill scraping of nails on a chalkboard. Eri gasped, unprepared, only half-unwilling.

She realised she didn't know what his tongue felt like, surprised as she was to find it sliding over hers in a possessive, heavy quickness. Mirio hadn't kissed her like this. Kai had never kissed her like this. She didn't know what to do, didn't know why she liked the wet slide of muscle on muscle even though it was disgusting and probably unhygienic and made Kai clasp her face in a callous squeeze to keep her from pulling away.

Breathy and clueless, Eri allowed her own tongue to press against his, imagining the slippery feel of Mirio's lips. Imagining that the soft moans through her mouth were his, and that the saliva pooling at her mouth's corners like the wetness in her underwear was because of him.

The hand around her jaw slinked down to her shoulder, ghosting over her breast over her ribcage into her hip. Kai pulled away, leaving Eri's lips tender and lonely, aching for more. She felt her spit glowing white along her skin, its moistness overwhelming and wonderful.

"Come closer," Kai said, both his hands over her bum, pulling her towards the edge of the desk. "Open your legs more. More. Wider."

Through a haze, Eri did so. She closed her eyes, relishing the cool air in all her body's crevices as her underwear was slipped from its place, to be cast aside like a ragged piece of skin. There were bubbles in her chest. A pleasure in her groin that bordered on agony. And Eri, lolling her head on her shoulders, had to swallow down _hard _on the urge to murmur Mirio's name.

She expected to open her eyes and to find Kai unzipping himself. To find the wet, throbbing thing he'd thrust into her bared and waiting.

But instead, she found him on his knees. For the first time, her legs spread wide and weak on his shoulders, Kai got onto his knees and pressed his tongue to the sensitive space in her legs. And Eri had never felt anything like it, the soaking drag over her nakedness. She whimpered, feeling the tip of his tongue dip deeper into her, feeling it flick, feeling it, feeling it, and shaking at the sensation. Ever more daring, she ran her fingers through Kai's hair, picturing it blonde rather than brown, picturing blue eyes glancing up at her hungry and glowing rather than those well-known golds.

His name teetered on her lips' edge. Mirio, Mirio, _Mirio_.

His tongue moved in circular motions at first. Slow around the specific spot that felt _so good_, then faster and sharper until Eri begged him to stop. He didn't stop. He licked her, sucked her, flicked with his tongue for what seemed a gorgeous age. He moaned when Eri balled his hair into her fist and pressed his face further into her. She moaned. He moaned.

Something inside of Eri started to unknot and quiver numbly: pinpricks of pressure up the backs of her thighs, a tightening about the walls inside of her. Small explosions. Mounting in a careful mingling of pain and pleasure.

Her legs stiffened against his shoulders and she waited eagerly.

But Kai stopped, and the feeling paused in its climb.

Pleading, Eri rasped, and looked down at him as he looked up at her. One hand scratching at his neck, his cheeks breaking out in that awful redness of bumps and bothered flesh, the welling pleasure receded dramatically as Eri saw the revulsion in his features.

He'd never done this before, slipped himself between her legs and lapped at her skin. Because it was disgusting. Eri felt herself shrink into a terrible shame. She was disgusting. His breath cold over the wetness inside of her. Her body throbbing and wishing desperately for more, though she flinched away in horror under his stare. She shut her eyes. There were tears she refused to cry – tears from the surge of dirtiness, tears from the foiled pleasure.

"S-Sorr–"

She couldn't finish. A gasp ripped through her. Kai, one hand still scratching violently at his neck, buried his head back into her legs and started again. Ripping his jacket off halfway and throwing it away to the side. The same with his tie. The same with his shirt. Ravishing her until she couldn't help the tears that flowed down her cheeks and the convulsing bursts through her body.

His name slid from her lips. She couldn't stop it, though the taste of the syllable was demise – "More. More, Kai, _please_."

Standing to his full height, undoing his belt in a skilled swipe of movement, he left her heaving for breaths on the desk. Unhurried. Rivetedly watching her impatience grow. He stepped out from his remaining shreds of clothing to reveal his naked body in its entirety: furious red in places with hives, muscular and frightening. He plucked off his gloves and dropped them where he stood. And then taking his cock in his hand, balancing himself between Eri's legs once again, he sunk himself into her.

He thrusted. Hard. Too hard, the feeling an ungodly sort of good, and Eri couldn't help a harsh cry as Kai began a rough, grunting rhythm. In-and-out, in-and-out, her body clasping to his as though she wanted him. And in that moment, she did. She wanted him, Kai. She wanted Mirio. She wanted the undistilled heat and tightness about her insides to mount further into indescribable points of painful ecstasy. Kai breathing heavy in her ear. Mirio's face plastered across her imagination. The feeling so perfectly–

"What are you doing?" Kai rasped quietly, slowing but not stopping in his thrusts.

Eri froze, and looked down to her fingers rubbing her pink flesh above Kai's cock. Automatic. Unconscious. The contact of her finger and wet skin feeding into her sharp, bright shivers. Face hot, Eri pulled her hand away.

"It just felt good," she said ashamedly, and was surprised when Kai took her wrist – gently, _so gently _– and moved her touch back to where it had been.

"Don't stop," he murmured, a peculiar weakness about the command. "Do it faster. And say my name again."

She did. She said his name, and every time she did he moved inside of her with a desperate, demanding insistence. _Again. Louder. Again, Eri. Please. _And as the feeling began a relentless ascent into heights Eri grasped longingly at, as the illusion of Mirio grew into ever greater vividness like a reflection upon calm black waters, Eri forgot entirely what it felt like to hate herself and to be revolted by Kai's hands all over her. For just a moment, he wasn't terrifying, and she was getting exactly what she wanted.

He gasped into her ear. A sharp, pained breath that made her name sound nothing at all like a curse.

Something unraveled completely, and Eri threw her arms around Kai's neck as a flaring spark plunged down from her heart into her body's depths. Every inch of her seemed to quake – for Kai, against Kai, for Mirio in all his imaginary realness – and she felt her walls flutter in despairing relief. Like every sort of pain washing itself out from her body.

In those few seconds, it was like every sensation Eri had ever squirmed against being turned on their heads. She came. She came around Kai as though they were lovers and it wasn't terrible. It wasn't filthy.

Kai flung himself into her once more too, freezing there precariously as he shook and released his own tension inside of her. One hand grasping at her fingers on the table, the other clawing down her back's skin with a sweet agony Eri didn't feel.

Just as quickly as it had happened, it was over. And everything disappeared into a quiet numbness.

Eri kept her eyes shut, overcome and near-exhausted by the feeling. The image of Mirio receded into blackness until it was only her and Kai, there in a strain of highly strung sensation and emotion. He said nothing, only leaned over her with his head heavy in her shoulder. Labored breaths and an itching skin to which he lifted his fingers every few seconds to pluck at and scratch. Not flinching when Eri hiccupped against an unstoppable welling in her throat, not moving when she breathed out a helpless, spent whimper.

She held herself closer to Kai, whose skin was the only skin she'd ever known so closely, and breathed wet sighs of horror and relief. Because for the first time, there in his arms, she felt so close to whole it was wounding. The foreign realness raw and tangible. The cold tremor of his palm over her naked flesh no longer so frightening – because now he wasn't so powerful. Not like this.

Not like this.

* * *

**A/N: P.S. I will not be accepting hate for this chapter, please and thank you.**


	17. xvi

_xvi_.

Matters progressed quickly. Naturally, Mirio hadn't believed a word Eri had said about Overhaul.

Nighteye… well, he wouldn't have believed it either. Which made it fortunate and not entirely unexpected that Sir followed Eri home the night she'd come to the hotel, and that he'd waited unflinchingly in her street's darkness. Waited until a black car stopped by her front gate some time later, and from out the backseat there'd slinked that awful, familiar face. Overhaul. He'd gone around the back of the house. Lights had flickered on. Back off again. And Nighteye, level-headed despite his obvious horror, had returned to the hotel to make arrangements.

Hardly two days went by before Mirio was checked out and relocated to a tiny rental house: white picket fence, flowerbeds and a stone pathway to the front door. It was exactly the sort he'd been eying out for weeks now, and despite his anything-but-domestic position he imagined planting lilies. Pristine Easter lilies; ferocious tiger lilies in adamant tangerine; blushing martagon and stargazers. And amongst them there would be Eri, her hands stroking beguiled and beguiling at the petals Mirio would grow for her.

There were windows too, through which silvery light fell in tumbles – they overlooked the garden. Beyond that, they overlooked the street. The very specific street which now seemed haunted by ghosts of the past. And that house. A very specific house, three gates up and across the way.

Nighteye had already set up a station by each of the windows. Naturally, it was not to look at all the garden-space for lilies.

He'd also contacted a handful of pros. Eraser Head, who'd be taking time off from the school. Deku, who had seemed about ready to drop everything.

"To simply storm in could have disastrous effects," Nighteye had explained to Mirio and everybody else, whether by phone or web cam or email. "And not only for Eri, who may still very well be in danger. We first of all need to establish what sort of reach Overhaul has developed, and what the status is regarding the bullet situation. I doubt they're _only_ in Russia, though their circulation there as well as throughout Japan is a very likely possibility. It will prove necessary to contact the Russian authorities, though I am hesitant at this stage."

All Mirio's business meetings for the week (what was originally meant to be his last week in Kagoshima) were cancelled.

His presence outside the property was to be as limited as possible.

Most of all, he wasn't supposed to see Eri again.

This was what Mirio and Nighteye discussed on the staircase that evening. Sir, after having received the keys for the house, had bought a few basic supplies – one such thing being a six pack of beers. He and Mirio each stewed over a bottle now, side by side and not looking at each other.

"I understand it will be difficult for you," Nighteye said. "Please believe me, I do."

Mirio's hands shook, and he struggled to swallow his beer. "But for the sake of the mission…" he said this half-heartedly, bitter feelings burning holes in his throat.

"Yes. Though for both your and Eri's sakes as well." Sir did sound sorry. "Your relationship is a ticking bomb – you know it's only a matter of time before she starts to raise suspicion in that little household. Frankly, I would be surprised if she hasn't already."

Dejectedly, Mirio ran his hand over his face. He sighed. He shook his head at everything and nothing, and sipped generously from his beer again. Nighteye drank too, though with an unappetizing reserve.

"You're worried about her."

"It's like my soul splits apart when I think about the things that _he_ could be doing to her. That he's already done."

"It is unfathomable."

"I wasn't there for her." Mirio clutched the bottle, and dreaded the sinking feeling which washed over him. "She was right there – I had her _right there _in my hands. But I was too weak and I let her go and now… Oh god." Sinking, sinking. All these years. "And I'm still too weak to do anything for her now. It's like – like I just accepted having her sneak in and out that hotel room because I knew there was nothing else I'd ever be able to–"

Nighteye's hand flattened between Mirio's shoulder blades, wide and boney, and with a profundity to its touch which was quite unexpected. "You've been irresponsible. We won't pretend that's not true, and we can only be thankful that the danger you and Eri have put each other in hasn't yet materialised. But Mirio," Sir's voice quavered, the sound of it as subtle but distinct as the first cracks in glass, "you cannot blame yourself for what happened in the past. You were not weak. Never. Nor are you weak now, and we _will _stop Overhaul this time."

"But Eri–"

"Will have eyes on her twenty four seven from now on. Bubble Girl will be arriving tomorrow, and a few others throughout the rest of the week." Sir met Mirio's eye. "We'll do as much as we can to keep her safe until we're able to arrest Overhaul."

"I need to see her one more time. Just once. Just so she knows what's going to happen."

"I don't think–"

Mirio trembled. "_Please_. I can't just leave her."

A sigh. Nighteye took a heavier sip from his bottle, and a lengthy, loaded silence befell the house. Both he and Mirio remained locked in a hush as they were in place, though through their stares there was communicated a direness, a heartbroken urgency which couldn't be explained any further with words. It was in this that Mirio realised how belligerently Sir's hand shook against his back. How the deeper the day sank into night outside, the more Sir's gaze dimmed to a gloomy, clear shade behind his glasses.

Something swelled between them with sluggish anticipation. Sewing itself into Nighteye's lips was an offbeat twist, an emotion Mirio couldn't place – maybe because he'd never seen a look so burdened, so simply and cleanly sad, on Sir's face before (except perhaps, for when Mirio had lost his quirk, when they'd all realised that it wasn't going to come back).

In a slow movement, Nighteye looked away. "It's going to hurt you and her for this to happen. But it's going to hurt worse if you lose her again." He tapped his fingers along the neck of the bottle. "It's only going to be for a little while. But if you don't let her go now, you're going to have to let go of her later when it won't only be for _a little while_."

Suddenly, things didn't seem so much to be about Mirio and Eri anymore.

Mirio blinked. "Sir?"

"I held onto somebody I loved when I shouldn't have, thinking I'd be able to keep them. To keep them safe. With me."

Everything was quiet. "And you lost them because of it."

Everything was a little more strained and vulnerable than it had been in a long time. "Yes. I lost them."

In Mirio's pocket, his phone began to ring. And though he hadn't saved the number (some force of instinct had stopped him from doing so), he knew it was Eri. Waiting for him on the other line. Unsuspecting. Nighteye seemed to know it too, glancing to the cellphone as Mirio pulled it into view, the unnamed number flaring vibrant and suggestive across the screen. He sighed once again with a loaded resignation, and stood weakly from his place on the staircase.

"One more time," Nighteye said, not looking at Mirio anymore. "Make sure you tell her how much she means to you." Then, with an unusual drag to his step which couldn't be blamed on his few sips from the beer, Sir ascended and went to his station at the window.


	18. xvii

**A/N: Warning again - there are more naughties in this chapter. But they are nice naughties. Proceed with caution. xx**

* * *

_xvii_.

Tonight would be the last time. Throughout the day, Mirio had reminded himself of it with a firm though reluctant resolve. Even when he'd gone to the flower shop in a moment of dashing claustrophobia, he'd been overwhelmed by a sense of aimlessness when he'd arrived. The old lady, in her garden-bright kimonos and attentiveness, had noticed it – how Mirio only looked longingly at the flowers rather than plucking them up to buy as he'd become wont to do, sighing and hanging his head at their colourful bunches with a maudlin burden.

"Whatever is the matter, young man?"

"I have no one to buy flowers for today, Obasan."

"Oh dear. You do look to be in need of some brightening." And she'd handed Mirio a thin bouquet of pale chrysanthemum clippings. "Take these for yourself then, why don't you? And come back next week with that lovely smile of yours."

She'd tapped his cheek with that paper thin hand, and had sent Mirio on his way as though they were old friends.

Now, the chrysanthemums sat in a drinking glass on the windowsill, having faded from lavender to lilac to mauve in the room's spreading darkness. It was near-black outside, and still save for the flash of lights in windows. On and off again. On and off again. No black car had stopped in front of the house across and up the road, and Mirio – having sat unmovingly at the window for the last two hours – had seen no sign of Overhaul. What it meant, he didn't know and dreaded to think about.

Bubble Girl had arrived that morning. She and Nighteye were off in the back of the house, speaking in voices too low and fast for Mirio to make out – they'd promised to make themselves scarce but wouldn't leave; they would let Mirio and Eri be alone but wouldn't let them be _alone_. The reasons for it had nothing to do with Mirio and Eri themselves, of course, but still Mirio could not help the feeling of being a teenager again, chaperoned by Mom & Dad Incorporated when all he wanted was to have Eri completely and indisputably and uninhibitedly to himself. To hold her and kiss her and do things to her as though their lives depended on it. Because maybe their lives did depend on it. Who could say when things were so fucked up as they were?

There were takeaways in the kitchen which were probably cold and chewy by now. One more beer in the fridge which could not have seemed more unappetizing than it did then.

And from the window overlooking the garden, the specific street, the specific house, Mirio saw Eri. She appeared, not at the front gate but from around the back of the house in dashing, tight quietness – then she was through the street, a starry glow like an angel across the black tar – the she was up the stone pathway leading to the rental house's front door. Her steps were measured, cautious all the way; it seemed her and Mirio's newfound nearness in terms of address had thrown any sense of rebellious confidence she may have had before. Indeed, she looked over her shoulder constantly, back towards the house from which she'd come. Slow in parting. Slow in arriving.

When finally she rang the doorbell, Mirio cringed. The sound seemed so loud, as though it would wake the entire neighborhood. As though it would dredge up ghosts and send them rushing after Eri in a possessive, sleepless rage.

Things were eerily quiet in the rest of the house.

Eri was eerily quiet when Mirio opened the door.

He and she watched each other through a frightening unreality, Eri perhaps realising as Mirio knew that this was the last 'once more' they'd been granted. "Here–" he touched his hand to her shoulder, and stepped aside. "Come inside."

Hesitation. She looked back again to the house from which she'd come.

"We're still safe here, Eri."

But were they really?

They dashed on tip-toe up the stairs, Eri's hand holding darling and soft to Mirio's as he led her through foreign, undecorated corridors. If it weren't for the renewed threat hanging above their heads, Mirio could have laughed. He got the feeling Eri could have too. They could have laughed together because indeed, to sneak into one of the bedrooms – where the curtains were drawn and the double bed had been made with goose down duvets and throw pillows – felt innocent and hysterical. To close the door behind themselves was thrilling in some long-gone, teenaged way even if the air hung itself heavy with unspoken somethings.

They sat down together on the edge of the bed. Mirio put his arm around Eri so that she could go nowhere but into his side; and though she leaned against him lightly she also twisted her head to look at him head-on, wide-eyed and flustered.

Only one of the bedside lamps was turned on. It dipped the room in a frail, mothy dimness, and cast dewy shadows about Eri's face. The material of her grey vest was thin, and low about her chest. She was wearing jeans – and god, Mirio was certain no woman had ever looked as lovely in jeans as she did. Loose hair. Feet thin and chiseled and cool white and bare, because the house hadn't come with slippers.

"It was weird coming here," Eri said coyly, and smiled a little. "This house. I never really noticed it very much before now." She pulled a silly face. "Although I have thought once or twice that it's kind of ugly. No offense."

Mirio laughed. "None taken. I'm just glad I didn't choose it."

"I like the big windows though."

"So do I."

"Kai's never allowed big windows in any of the places we've stayed."

She'd never brought him up in conversation before, and to hear his name mentioned so casually horrified Mirio. Not to say it made him angry. And somehow, there was nothing uncomfortable about it either. But the fact that Overhaul – 'Kai' – could have any part in something so domestic as the sort of windows Eri liked was hard to swallow. The brief mention of him was electrifying in all the wrong ways. What other sorts of things might Eri have been able to say?

In what other ways had Overhaul – '_Kai_' – embedded himself in Eri's ways? Would she one day arbitrarily mention his favourite food? Would she point out at some point that he too had liked to leave his eyes over her legs when she wore jeans? Were there cozy, hidden parts of Eri's heart that Overhaul knew better than Mirio could ever hope to know?

He grinned against the notion, and touched a finger to the tip of Eri's chin. "I'll find you a house with windows taking up entire walls, if you'd like that."

She hummed hazily. "Maybe."

"One day."

She brought her face close to his, and spoke quietly. "Maybe one day."

"I'm going to take you away from all this. One day _soon_." Mirio moved to touch her berry-plump bottom lip. "But there's something I need to do first and… _and_… it would be better, safer for now, if…" To finish seemed the cruelest thing.

Eri watched him intently. With impossible tenderness, she kissed his finger.

"We shouldn't see each other like this anymore," Mirio said, persevering in his attempt at a smile even though he was doing a good job of breaking his own heart. Even if he knew it wasn't forever (not this time). He spread his fingers, his palm, across the plane of her cheek. "For a little while."

Somehow, there was none of the surprise he had expected from her. Eri screwed her mouth into a contemplative pout, and blinked against a subtle dread rearing itself in her eyes. Neither of them spoke for a while; they made no attempt to fight nor deny it. If anything, it was almost as though Eri had seen this coming. Lithely, she slinked out from Mirio's side and into his lap – her long, graceful thighs on either side of his, her hands weighing themselves like daisies on his shoulders.

Her voice was rippling. "What do you need to do?"

"To keep you safe."

"I've been safe for a long time already."

It was like she believed it.

"The rest of the world then." Lips coming close, Mirio spoke in a near-whisper, "You didn't tell me the truth when you said he left the bullets in Russia, right?" His hand found its way into her waist, beneath her shirt – a gradual dip, cool and fleshly. "And _this–_" his thumb grazed the raised, plastic texture of a scar. "He's still doing this to you. You wouldn't still be with him if he wasn't, right?"

"I don't know."

_Like she believed it._

"Why not?"

"He's my husband."

"Husbands don't use their wives like he uses you."

"Sometimes they do."

"I would never."

"Because I can't give you anything," she said, and lifted her fingers to Mirio's temples. She stroked his skin, trailed her touch through his hair. "I've only ever taken things from you. Important things. And I can't give them back even though I want to."

Mirio pressed his hand to the dainty width of her back. Held her close. Close enough to feel her breaths wash against his face, to trace the shape of her jaw and cheeks with his lips. "You're enough for me," he said into her skin. "More than enough. Just you. I would give up everything a thousand times over for you to be with me." He held her closer. "Only me."

There was the softness of her mouth along his forehead. "Maybe one day."

His hand grasped her nape, white hair concealing the touch like a veil. "One day soon."

Her lips found his.

They didn't kiss gently, but rather with an imploring impatience: a cursive slur of mouths, of hands gone dumb with fervor.

Mirio clasped her against him like she was a figment, a specter simply waiting to slip away, and she fed herself into him anxiously and quietly, fingertips here then there, in his neck and on his chest and beneath his shirt. It was familiar, wholly without the self-consciousness of kisses gone by; it was risky and new, their tongues meeting in a wet, hesitant mingling. Full of a preemptive loss and a disorder of possible love. Where before Mirio's heart had been still, now it blazed to life like a wasp trapped under glass. Eri's face was hot, and smooth, and frozen in an expression of bright, clear feeling – it felt like a cheat for Mirio to open his eyes to glance it, but still he did, and felt himself spill out of body helplessly.

He rolled his head away to settle into her neck, kissing along the tendons and behind her ear, body screamingly alert to the invisible valleys Eri's fingers traced along his ribcage. She clutched the material of his shirt and pulled it up over his head. He took hers off too, withdrawing for only a moment to consider – to drink in – the rises and falls of her stomach, the skin ragged with thick scars and milky pale beneath; her breasts, small and beckoning in a flimsy bra; the ivory ridges of her collarbones and shoulders.

Like cupping wine glasses, Mirio melded his palms around Eri's chest. Kneading. Squeezing gently as he brought his mouth back to hers flagrantly, where she sighed into his tongue.

"Is this okay?"

Eri nodded, eyes dazedly shut, and continued to kiss him.

"And this?" He undid her bra, and slipped its straps from her shoulders.

She shook it off completely, dropping it at Mirio's feet. Her nipples were flushed rose, bright against her skin's whiteness – Mirio took them between his fingertips, thumbing roughly, and was charmed by the blossomy spread of Eri's blush from her cheeks down into her neck as she nodded once again. A quietly rasped _yes_. Another as Mirio wrapped his lips around one nipple to kiss, to suck, leaving dews of his mouth around the sensitive, red flesh and relishing the way his name trembled out from Eri's lungs.

Curiously, she touched at his nipples too, circling them with a testing lightness and ghosting her touch across his chest in restless, eager patterns.

Mirio circled his arms around her waist and twisted their bodies around to the bed. The white covers sighed beneath their weight, and moulded themselves around the taut, bowed shape of Eri's frame like an embracing cloud. She undid her jeans; she lifted her hips lazily to tug them off, revealing those legs lithe as tulip stems and the narrowness of her hips. And so many scars. So, so many scars, it would take a week for Mirio to kiss them all. To graze and love them all like they were precious.

He laid himself on top of her, kissing her mouth again (not knowing where to start on the rest of her body) and pressuring his groin – growing ever heavier – against her own. The material of her underwear was a frail barrier. Her hands found their way up and down the length of his back, her body going stiff and breathless beneath him as he continued to work himself against her.

"You're so beautiful."

"Can you take your pants off too?"

He did. He retreated momentarily, and rushed to unbuckle his belt, to drop and kick away his trousers to some unknown coordinate – his cock swelling, and begging, and only growing more desperate as he delighted in the image of Eri waiting on the bed. Nothing but underwear between the both of them. It had been minutes. It felt like an eternity, and the sweetest eternity known to any man on earth. Chest rising and falling with slow, steady breaths, Eri sat up and stared. Stared with a strange expression as Mirio came close once again, her face level with his stomach, her gaze travelling downwards as her hand lifted to his hardness.

Her lips glistened wetly.

The look in her eyes was glassy as she flattened her palm over Mirio's erection, and he moaned so ardently it seemed to make her shiver. She rubbed, the pressure unbearable in its gentleness; she watched the motion of it with a charmed fascination, as though her hand wasn't hers at all. All the while, looking down at her with a pained, delicious anticipation, Mirio combed his fingers through her hair. Waiting. Somehow helpless and able to do little more than groan her name like this in itself was ecstasy.

Her voice came chime-like and faraway. "Can I–?"

"God, yes… please do, Eri," Mirio stuttered, even having no idea what Eri was going to ask. "_Please_."

Fingers in the elastic of his underwear, she pulled the material away so that it fell at his feet. So that his cock was bared fully to her. And with a characteristic softness which had never been so awful (glorious and darling, but agonizing against the hopeless hurry which homed itself all through Mirio's body), she enclosed her fingers around his length and moved them along in awkward, uncertain shuffles. Tentative. Light enough to not feel like much. And very obviously, very innocently inexperienced – this in particular made Mirio dizzy with mind-numbing relief. To think that she didn't touch Overhaul like this. At least… not enough to know how to do it properly.

He held his hand over hers. "Like this." And then he let his head fall back on his shoulders at the feel of Eri's palm shifting more smoothly along his erection. Her fingers thin and delicate, and clumsy if Mirio ventured to loosen his grip. Her wrist twisting weakly after a few quickening strokes. And fuck, did she look gorgeous doing it: long-limbed and lily white, biting her lip in an expectant concentration or flicking at her mouth's corners with the tip of her tongue, an endearing flash of pink on pink.

Mirio moaned again, and guided her to go faster.

Faster, until there was too much breath caught up in his chest. Faster still, until his hips began to rock for more.

Eri looked up at him, dreamy through heavy lids. "Does – does it feel okay?"

"You're doing it so well, Eri," Mirio gasped.

She cracked a tight smile, and slowed after a little while more of delicate, eager caresses. She stopped. Let go. And still smiling, she pressed her cheek to Mirio's stomach, slung her arms around him in a gangly, skin-filled hug. "Your heart is beating fast," she said. "It's nice."

"Your face is nice."

"Thank you. I made it myself."

"Well would you look at this." Mirio leaned her back onto the bed, grinning down at her dewy expression. "She's cute _and _she's funny." He lay down alongside her so that his stomach was curved against her side, his legs twisting up with her own. He kissed her forehead, traced his hand down the length of her naked torso while his body throbbed for more. For more of her.

Eri, Eri, oh god, Eri.

He curved his touch once more over the mounds of her breasts, considering again the tautness of her nipples and their clear shade of pink, and then dipped his hand into the cavern of flesh beneath her ribcage. Over her stomach where the skin was soft and finely stretched over slight, unexpected muscle. In between the valley of her hipbones. Stopping, hidden by the white cotton of Eri's panties, where his fingers found the spot between her legs wet and welcomingly warm. He circled his fingers slowly at first, relishing the nuances across Eri's features as they tightened and blushed. He circled quicker, the muted sound of her keening driving itself through him.

At some point, she looked away, and brought the back of her hand to her mouth to muffle her moans. Fingers now dipping slowly inside of her, Mirio moved himself to be back on top; and with his free hand, he made her look at him. He took her hand away from her mouth and instead held it to his, where he kissed her knuckles. Sucked two of her fingers, finding their weight against his tongue exhilarating. And indeed, finding the way she gasped at the motion of it the most brilliant sort of agony he'd ever known.

His fingers came out of her wet.

She lifted her hips and curled her legs obligingly for Mirio to slip off her underwear, and she watched through a sort of daze – her cheeks blotchy like waterlilies, lips parted in an enamoured and panting line – as he repositioned his hips along hers, as he took himself in hand and... paused.

"Before I do this," he murmured, and began to pull away reluctantly, "I'm going to find us a condom. I think I had one or two in my suitcase."

Eri reached her fingers quickly, fervently, into Mirio's hair. "No. I want you like this."

"But Eri–"

"I can't have kids."

For a moment, he stared. "Yes, I know you can't. Which is why I need to get a–"

"No. I mean I can't have kids ever." She touched at a spot between her hipbones without seeming to fully realise she was doing it. "I… _can't…_"

"Oh." It dawned on him. "Oh god, Eri. I'm so sorry."

She draped her arms around his shoulders once again, and smiled beckoningly through a bemused fugue. "Please don't stop, Mirio. I want you to do this."

"Are you sure?"

She pulled him in, and kissed him. Long. Soft. Murmuring into his mouth, "I want you _so_ _much_."

The quivering truth of her voice made Mirio weak, his chest on fire, his cock hard and tight and gasping for her. Uncertainly at first, eying the place on her stomach where her hand had been and wondering over the thin, horizontal scar he spotted, he took himself in his hand once again and pumped a few times more. Then, somehow feeling himself balanced at the very edge of a cliff face, he sunk himself into her and forgot – at least for the moment, in a bright flare of sensation and feeling – about everything. Aware only of her and the striking tightness of her walls around him as he fed himself deeper, deeper, tighter – this, though Mirio dared not think too deeply about it, was another small victory. How knotted she was with him inside of her.

How she went so stiff and so quiet with each movement he made. So frozenly stiff and so anxiously quiet, Mirio was almost sure she'd passed out. And how at last she gasped, how she squeezed herself closer to him with her fingertips clawing at his back, her own spine arching, when finally he began to thrust into her. She said, moaned, cried his name. He said, moaned, cried hers too as he plunged himself ever further. Steeping himself in her depths. Drowning himself in the sounds and touches, the way in which Eri trembled against and for him.

Everything about it was brilliant, though in the grand scheme of things it was quiet and simple.

Everything about it was worth everything Mirio had ever lost.

And when his spine set itself alight with shuddering, delicious tremors – when he came inside of her – Mirio collapsed with his face alongside hers, sweat carving streams into his temples. His heart bounded in his ears. The room was silent apart from the spent, excited echoes of their breathing. Mirio, weak and yet somehow vividly awake, held his hand against Eri's cheek. "I love you."

She said it back. Nothing had ever sounded so true before.

For a long time afterwards, longer than was probably safe, they lay there naked and wet with sweat and cum, holding each other. Stroking each other's skin in indiscernible spirals, kissing and smiling like teenagers who'd just gotten away with deflowering each other while Mom & Dad Incorporated were in the very next room. Giggles floated and were forgotten in the bedroom's hazy glow. Eri looked inexpressibly young, innocent and beguiling as her face burned the colour of an angel.

In the room's more shadowed corners, there loomed in wait the knowledge that this would be the last opportunity they'd have to be in each other's arms. Just for a little while. But still a while too long. For now though, they chose to ignore it. To bask instead in each other's touches and kisses, the newfound vulnerability which should have seemed stranger than it did.

"Would you have wanted kids?" Mirio asked at some forgotten point, Eri tracing circles on his chest.

She replied almost immediately, "Not with Kai."

"And if it hadn't been with him?"

"I've always tried not to think about it." She stopped tracing, and nuzzled her head against him. "But sometimes, when I see pregnant women and women with children in TV shows or on the street, I get a little sad because I think that maybe I'd like to have my own. Or at least… I'd like to be able to. If things were different. I would let them go to ballet classes and eat sweets. Not all the time, but often-ish."

Mirio smiled dumbly. "I'd let my kids eat sweets whenever they wanted."

"Their teeth would rot."

"I'd take them to the dentist."

"What if they don't like the dentist?"

"We'd have to be firm with them."

"But then we could reward them with more sweets afterwards."

Mirio chuckled. "I was thinking something more along the lines of how we could take them to watch a movie, or go ice-skating, or something."

"I've never been ice-skating." She twisted her head against his chest to grin at him, exactly like the hypothetical child of the hypothetical future Mirio was imagining. "You could take me one day too."

"You know," he kissed her forehead, "I was thinking exactly the same thing."

* * *

**A/N: Aww.**


	19. xviii

_xviii._

Eri returned home that night full on the feeling of him, the weight of his goodbye kiss lingering all throughout her body. They'd crossed a defining line together – before and after, knowing perfectly well that things would be very different from now on. Now that Eri was his; knowing as she did now how desperately, how tenderly and delightfully she wanted nothing more than to be just that. _His_. How long would it be? Days? Weeks? How long would the afterglow of their shared moments sustain her? Minutes? No. Seconds. Mere seconds before she'd be longing for Mirio once more.

Indeed, her heart had returned to him constantly as she'd crossed the street, though she dared not glance back over her shoulder – knowing that to see him there in the window would break her completely, that she'd be able to do nothing to stop herself from turning back. Even now, circling out of sight around the back of her and Kai and Chrono's home to the entrance she wasn't supposed to know about, it was the most terrific and difficult thing she'd ever done not to give up everything and go back to him. To Mirio.

Mirio, Mirio, oh god, Mirio.

The thought of him made her smile, though her smile made her want to weep.

Her skin was still warm and blushing where his hands had touched.

He'd told her he loved her when nobody had ever loved her before. She'd told him she loved him too without having realised the words were leaving her lips, and she knew she'd been telling the truth – that she loved him entirely and clearly – even if before she'd only given love in half-measures and the form of fear. It felt good. Terrifying. But good. To love somebody.

Eri propped open the kitchen window with a tight, measured quietness, and pulled herself into the house's darkness as though it were her greatest talent to be sneaky and subtle. Really, it kind of was. She'd had years to learn how to slip out from Kai and Chrono's hawkish grips, whether it was simply to hide away when she was in trouble or to avoid getting into trouble at all. She'd mastered it now in a matter of months, slipping away from them in the most literal form she'd ever managed.

Closing the window again, she grinned to herself. Feeling proud. Feeling whole. A little sleepy too, and thirsty.

"Eri?"

Everything crashed against her like a bullet.

She spun around, and there in the shadows by the sink – glass of water glinting in hand, eyes bright with utter horror at the sight of her – was Chrono. Faintly outlined. Enough so for Eri to see the shape of his hand fly out, strange and murky in the lightlessness. Drained of any feeling she may have had before, Eri crinkled before the motion.

But there was no blunt force coming down against her. Only the kitchen light turning on. And she was forced to bear the scrutiny of Chrono's mortified expression in yellow-white definition.

He was in a night gown and socks speckled by cartoon geese. Eri had chosen those socks for his birthday two years ago.

He was frozen, and looking her up and down as though she may have been a ghost. She must have been. Because the real Eri would not have dared to be outside at this hour; because the real Eri wouldn't have taken obvious advantage of the fact that the security cameras in the garden were blind to the kitchen wall and its precarious proximity to the back entrance. Yet, here she was. The real Eri. Facing down the real Chrono no matter how she may have pleaded to whatever fairytale creature or god that this be a nightmare.

Maybe he saw in her eyes how she scrambled for a story to tell him. Because suddenly, cracking through the confused hush, he looked angrier than he'd been in a long time. "What is the meaning of this? What were you doing out there?"

"I–I–" And suddenly, Eri forgot how happy she'd been.

"Where did you go?"

"For a walk," she spluttered.

"_A walk_?"

"Yes. Just up the road and back. I was… I was struggling to sleep and I–"

Chrono placed his glass down on the counter, and pierced through Eri with his ashen, frosty stare. "Don't you dare lie to me."

"I'm not, Kurono-san."

He was up close before Eri could catch a breath. "Let me ask you again, Eri. Where did you go?"

She didn't reply. Couldn't.

"Have you done this before?"

"Not– I haven't–"

"Anya told me to keep an eye out for you," he said, somehow conspiratorial and possibly sort of disappointed. "That you were acting strangely. I've noticed it, that you've been edgier than usual and saying some odd things. But I only thought–" He cut himself off sharply. Narrowed his eyes. "Was this what she was talking about?"

Everything in Eri's chest began to hurt, like she was being crushed from the inside out. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry. Please don't tell Kai."

"What were you _doing_?" They stared at each other. Chrono's face flared a sick colour when Eri didn't reply. "There's this, Eri – you can tell me now, or Anya _will_ tell me later. And trust me when I say that it will be worse for you if–"

"I've just been visiting somebody."

He didn't seem to have been expecting it, even if Eri knew he had been. "Who?"

"A friend. An important friend."

"_Who_?"

"It's nobody."

"Nobody. Nobody like the man from the market?"

Eri started to shake.

Chrono's eyes widened so that he looked a little manic. "Is it him?"

She nodded.

"How long?"

"Since then."

"That was months ago, Eri!"

Shocking herself, she looked at her hands and smiled a small, guilty smile. "I know."

Drawing a quivering breath, simmering, Chrono pressed his hands into his hair and looked away – as though to see Eri now was too much for him. Like he was genuinely a disappointed parent. He swore under his breath. A harsh, jolting _fuck_. And the weight of the word had power enough to snap Eri's spine in half because Chrono never swore. Never – except for when he was with Anya, apparently. And in moments like these.

He didn't say anything else for a while, and turned away to lean his hands onto the counter. When he did speak again, it was sinisterly soft. "You'll tell Overhaul when he gets home. You'll tell him the whole truth because he won't take kindly to anything else once he knows you've been lying to him. I'll be there with you, though my presence won't help much at this stage."

Eri felt her face blanch. "No…"

"You brought this on yourself."

"_No._ Please Kurono! He can't know!"

"You've been sneaking behind his back for months, Eri. He's your _husband_."

"But… but…" Mirio! "But I don't love him."

"Then learn to."

"Is Anya supposed to learn to love Dimitri-san? Do you not love _her_?"

"You watch your mouth," Chrono spat it like a snake. No, not a snake. He spat it with venom, indeed, but he may as well have been wearing that awful bird mask from years ago. "Anya has nothing to do with–"

"I'll never forgive you." Eri's heart broke without her having to do anything. "If Kai finds out, I'll never ever forgive you."

He shook his head, furious. "You're not in a position to be forgiving anybody."

"Then I'll tell Dimitri-san." In a million years, Eri would never have been able to dream up the look on Chrono's face as it appeared then. And in a million years, she would never have dreamed that she'd be able to be so cruel. "I'll tell him that you and Anya have been going behind _his _back for eight years, and that Anya called him stupid, and that the only reason you've ever been kind to me is to make Anya fall in love with–"

With slicing poise, his palm collided with her face. _Thwack! _Hot. Then icy. Kai had only ever punched her, or broken her bones, or ripped her apart, and those were all heavy oppressive sensations. This was much sharper. It prickled numbly across her cheek like a thousand alcohol-dipped needles. Eri, breathless, lifted her fingers as though expecting to find blood. Perhaps even some remnant of Chrono's hand. But there was nothing other than her skin, and Chrono staring at her with a new sort of horror on his face.

"Eri…" he began quietly, the air having sunk around them into a cold, close shattering.

She didn't let him finish. There were tears in her eyes. "I hate you," she said. "_I hate you_."

Then she ran, out from the kitchen and through the still-dark twists of passage and stairs. Crying. Breathing hard, the throbs of her heartbeat muffling the hard crack of the bathroom door as she shut it behind herself. There, slipping down along the wood, she shrank. She sat curled upon the tiled floor for a long time, only half-despising Chrono and half-waiting for him to come find her like he always did. To hug her, stroke her hair, tell her things weren't as bad as all that like he always did even though this time things certainly were all that bad and he probably hated Eri just as much as she hated him. Even if she only hated him a little bit. Though she wasn't really sure she hated him at all.

Not him. Not when he was the only one who'd ever held her when she'd cried.

Once, when she'd been twelve or thirteen, Kai had broken both her ankles because she'd been dancing with a boy out on the lawn. He – the boy, who was one of the Russian men's sons – had come to visit the compound with his father; he was only a little older than Eri, and had tried talking to her the entire day but to no avail (being as it was that she ran away from him like he was a monster out from under her bed); however, he'd caught her in the garden and had shown her a silly Russian dance. Had offered to teach it to her. Had held her hands and swayed her about until she was laughing herself stupid.

Why the memory came back now with so much painful clarity – the smell of the azaleas by the wall and the watery mess of sunlight after rain, the freckles that she'd spotted on the boy's knuckles – it was hard to say. But it all blended suddenly with the memory of Kai's cold glare when he'd caught them. And the feel of his naked hands. His body, massive and muscular, bent against hers, thin and small and pathetic, later that night while he'd snapped her ankles against the bed and then fixed them, and then snapped them again like bird bones. Reminding her that she was his. Nobody else's his. His only.

Then there'd been Chrono, who'd snuck into her room after Kai went to bed. He'd pulled Eri into his lap and had held her to his chest.

"He's only scared to lose you. Nobody understands you like he does," Chrono had whispered like a lullaby. "It hurts, I know. Ssh, Eri. It hurts, _I know_. But if you'd just be good, it wouldn't hurt so much."

Feebly, Eri whimpered and stood.

She wanted Chrono to tell her now that it wouldn't hurt so much, because somehow she'd always believed him. But no – she locked the bathroom door behind herself, and turned on the water to run a bath. Steam began to rise. Eri peeled off her clothes, and it was uncomfortable enough to have been her own skin that she was shedding.

She threw her shirt into the corner of the room, though not before whiffing it deeply to relish any lingering dews of Mirio's smell. So followed her bra. Her jeans. And so dazed was she, reeling on the light-headedness of having threatened and cried all in one breath, she was little bothered by the splotches of blood like droplets of thick red wine in her underwear.


	20. xix

_xix._

The next morning, Kai's arms were around her. His face was pressed lightly to her nape, breaths falling through the tangle of her hair, and Eri felt no pain: no sense of unraveling through her sinews to suggest that Kai had killed her and brought her back in the night; none of the tenderness that came with bruising or the stiffness of having been used. Just him holding her. And the sheets falling about their bodies. And his fingers stroking drowsily along her skin.

Eri shuffled uneasily out of his hold to sit. His hand drifted down her back, the other finding a place in her lap, and he lay curled around her defenseless and silent. Eyelids fluttering in frail sleep. Hair a fine, brown mess like a little boy's. Through a fugue, Eri stared at him – this soft, foreign Kai – and felt a vague sense of loathing quite similar, though more clear-headed and rational, to what she'd felt for Chrono just the night before.

She'd gone to bed without another word to Chrono; it was clear he hadn't said anything to Kai. Otherwise, the sighs drifting out from Kai's chest would not have been so content, and he would not have huddled himself about the bed in search of Eri's closeness. His foot touched hers. His hand closed around the material of her pajamas.

In a moment of long-sufferance, Eri trailed her fingers across his scalp and frowned.

Waking up to Kai was a very different sort of difficult to going to bed with him. Where at night he was often irritable and demanding – wanting answers to questions he'd stewed upon throughout the day, wanting sex, wanting Eri to put socks on because her feet were cold then wanting her to take them off because now it was too hot – he was always debilitatingly clingy in the mornings. Leaving the bed was near impossible without first pandering to some confused, childlike need of his to be cuddled (for lack of a term more suitable to someone like him).

Some days Eri minded it less than having to sleep with him. Some days she hated it in equal measure. Today though, she felt nothing for the feel of Kai's hair between her fingers and how he murmured her name with bleary affection. He was warm. He was familiar.

"Stay with me."

He spoke in his sleep sometimes.

"I'm hungry," Eri said, not so much hungry as she was simply empty.

Kai hummed. "Come back when you're done then."

She said she would, and he let her go. The corridors were dim and cold, making it hard to say what hour it was. Eri, hugging herself against the chill, walked painstakingly slow to the kitchen and considered the raw feeling in her stomach – as though she'd been scraped out, made hollow like a wooden girl. She imagined that, and almost laughed.

She was a matryoshka doll, painted to be pretty and with space for other smaller dolls to fit safely inside of her. Maybe a little less pretty. A little more splintered or dirty.

At the foot of the staircase, Chrono's study door was open. It wouldn't have been anything suspicious had it not been for the fact that the light was on. More than that, coming close, Eri could hear Chrono speaking to somebody, low and raging, and in Russian. Despite knowing that eavesdropping would get her into trouble, she stopped outside his door and strained to listen.

"–going to hurt her if he finds out," he was saying. "No. No, that's not the point. We've already been over this, Anya. The problem was that _you_ _knew _what she was doing and you didn't stop her. The fact that you didn't _say anything _to _me _is another story all its own."

Anya.

Chrono was breathing hard, and slurred his words strangely when he spoke again. "This is not the same thing and you know it. You loved me before Dimitri even– Oh, yes, go ahead. Go ahead and just try to deny it. You always do."

Numb all over, Eri peered around the doorframe into the study. Chrono was on the phone, his back to the door and his hand harshly clasping his hair. A bottle of sake from his and Kai's store was on the table, largely empty and with the lid missing.

"Excuse me?" he spat into the phone, and jerked his head on his shoulders as though to snap his own neck. "You knew _exactly _what he was doing to her. The whole time. Don't be so high and mighty. If it weren't for Kai's bullets and your cunty father-in-law extorting our profits, you wouldn't have that big fucking diamond on your finger, would you?" He hadn't spoken to Anya so darkly before. "No, you listen to me, my love. If something happens to Eri – _I said listen _– we all know you only tolerate Dmitri because of the money involved in being his wife – but if something happens to Eri, do you know what money he'll have then? A hell of a lot less, I can assure you."

Spinning around, looking awful and unsteady, Chrono swiped the bottle from his desk and gulped. His face was flushed brilliantly. His eyes were swollen, glassy, like he hadn't slept in days. Crashing backwards into his chair, so clumsily Eri was certain he would either miss his mark or send the chair tumbling right out from under him, he went quiet for a long time. Frozen, he listened, and sighed a vehement, miserable sigh.

"I'm sorry. Please don't – my darling, please don't cry. I didn't mean it like that."

It was a strange thing to hear, someone asking Anya not to cry. She was like the angels one saw outside of Russian cathedrals or in graveyards: carved to perfection and stone cold. Anya didn't cry. She made others cry.

Suddenly, through the understanding lens of retrospection, Eri remembered that night they'd watched Swan Lake in Fukuoka. How Chrono had cried then.

"Wait!" He shot forward in his seat. The sake fell out of his hand and did a wet, glassy tumble across the floor. "Wait, no, don't go!"

Had Eri been too cruel to him? Was it unfair to assume that he had no idea how she felt about Mirio?

"Anya, I'm so sorry. Let's talk this over. Please. Let's– I love y–"

The way he was cut short made it seem as though his bones had all cracked at once in a sick chorus of crunching. Or perhaps that the earth had split into two and swallowed him whole. An age passed in which Chrono just sat there, phone to his ear with no one on the other end. He dropped it eventually. Hands free and quaking visibly, he buried his face and began to sob like Eri had seen no man sob before – blubbering, making sounds like it hurt to breathe while his back heaved beneath his coat.

It hurt to watch.

Eri stood in the doorway now, bemused and entirely unhidden.

"Kurono-san…"

He snapped his head on his shoulders again, face wet and contorted as he looked at her, as he spluttered her name.

She parted her lips to say something, but nothing came out. The two of them stared at each other, and Eri realised she could easily have been staring into her own future. At least some version of it. "Would– would you like to–" she took a breath, aching under Chrono's dizzy gaze. "Can we have hot chocolate?"

"Hot chocolate?"

"Yes please."

He blinked at her like she was mad. "Yes. Yes, hot chocolate would be nice."

Indeed, hot chocolate would have been nice. But this morning, Chrono's hands were unsteady. The sugar bowl slipped from his fingers and left a crystalline mess of white across the floor, the shrill clang of porcelain meeting tile making Eri shiver; he swore bitterly under his breath, and poured too much milk into Eri's cup; he made himself a coffee, and burned himself when he tried to drink it.

Outside, the sky had only just begun to fade into a dreamy, dreary grey. It cast about the kitchen a haunted sort of look which Eri supposed was appropriate, and the lackluster hue made Chrono look paler than a dead man. He glared into the too-hot coffee. Despite sitting right next to each other, he seemed to forget that Eri was there until moments of self-consciousness made his eyes flicker towards her – at which point he'd sip more carefully from his mug, making a thoughtful sound before looking away again.

Eri's hot chocolate went cold quicker than it should have. It was too rich to drink like this, slathered with dairy.

"Are you angry, Kurono-san?"

"I'm furious."

"With me?"

"Yes. With you. But not with you. I don't know." Sharply, he slammed his mug onto the table and ignored the spillage. "I don't think we should tell Kai about this."

Eri waited for him to say more. He didn't. "Why not?"

"It would break everything."

"Okay."

"His heart, I mean. He has one too."

Eri couldn't be sure about that. "Okay."

Chrono wasn't able to settle his focus on her, try though he did. "But this is the condition," he muttered. "You won't ever, ever see that man again. Ever. This time, I'll know if you do."

The ultimatum didn't come across as earth-shattering or as final as Chrono had surely intended for it to be, likely because Eri and Mirio had already said their goodbyes. Not forever, Eri reminded herself. But still, with their promises shielding themselves away in her matryoshka-layered heart, she was able to muster out a weakly truthful, "Alright." After a moment, she added, "I'm sorry."

"Eri," Chrono placed his hand on hers; his touch was icy, "please try to love him."

"I can't."

"I know. But please try."

"After everything he's done?"

He looked pained and sad, and a little like he would be sick across the table. "Yes. Even with that. He doesn't know how to do anything else – he doesn't know how to show you that _he _loves _you_."

"This isn't what love looks like."

"You remember _Anna_ _Karenina_, don't you?" Chrono gave Eri's hand a squeeze, and said in Russian, "_There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts_. Remember?" Abandoning the coffee and Eri, he stood feebly. "I'm going to bed now. Don't tell Kai I spilled the sake."

Eri frowned. "And the sugar?"

"Oh, yes. Right. Just tell the maids to clean it all when they get here."

Then it was Eri alone, two barely touched cups on the table and the morning taking on a more yellow tinge. Chrono's footsteps receded down the corridor with an odd drag. Somehow, Eri imagined still being able to smell the alcohol on his breath – she conjured up before herself an image as though Chrono hadn't just left, his face all puffy and weighed with feeling, imploring her to try. Please just try, as though it could possibly be so simple.

She didn't like that he'd quoted Anna Karenina. Or rather, she didn't like that he'd used her favourite book to convince her of a lie.

Although, then again, was it really a lie? Perhaps not. Maybe Kai's supposed love was just a sick, sad truth which only reared itself in painful ways. Eri thought of him waiting for her now in their bedroom, quiet and not so frightening when he was veiled thinly by sleep. When he held her fast against him and breathed in her smell like she was a flower for the picking. He'd never told her before that he loved her. What would he say if she asked? She didn't really want to know. And instead of going back to him, she spent the full hour before the maids arrived sitting quietly by herself at the kitchen table.


	21. xx

xx_._

Change came slowly.

The long bouts of silence were expected – though their being so did nothing to help the sour, uncertain air which permeated Chrono and Eri's moments together – and to a certain extent, Eri had also known Chrono would become cold towards her. That is, he was not callous or even aloof, but lacking in any of the fondness he usually sprinkled upon her: secreted spoons of sugar in her tea, murmured conversations in the morning before Kai woke up, games or television after dinner. Their interactions became clinical and polite, and it wrenched Eri's heart into her throat with a rusty hook.

Such grief, a special sort like mourning, reached its first pinnacle when they went to the market that next week. The baskets were packed with their usual assortment of vegetables and fruits; the area had filled to its usual mid-morning crush of people; the water in the bay was tinted its usual cerulean under the sunlight.

Eri, relieved to be out of the house and doing something normal had fully expected for her and Chrono to have taiyaki together. She'd marked it in her mind as a white flag, a momentary retreat from the new tension which bristled between them, and though she could not grant herself the luxury of being excited, she was at the very least hopeful. However, when the time came, Chrono said nothing. Simply walked on in the direction home as though having forgotten completely about the taiyaki.

Albeit, Eri didn't say anything to remind him – she only accepted quietly and gracefully this unspoken snub, this awful but inevitable fate. Still, it left her hollow. It drove her to sit for hours afterwards in her and Kai's bedroom, knees to her chest, head hung heavy.

She didn't eat dinner that night. Nor did she have breakfast the next morning.

And of course, Kai saw it all. From the first moment. The way Chrono and Eri avoided each other's eyes, the way they avoided _his_.

Surprisingly though, he didn't bring it up with Eri like she'd thought he would. Rather, the whole thing inspired fits between him and Chrono. They started bickering about stupid things. Kai became dismissive where Chrono became irritable.

"_This _is exactly what I told you would happen," Kai had hissed one night while he and Chrono sat drinking sake in the living room. "Now look. Eri is upset. You've been acting maudlin over that Russian whore, and she's noticed."

"Don't talk about Anya like that."

"She's trash. I never wanted her around in the first place."

"And yet, here we are."

Kai sighed. "Really. I can't pretend to understand why you're so shaken up about the whole matter. She was bound to rip you up at some point. It only took longer than I expected, but nonetheless."

At any moment, Chrono – ghosting about like a frail afterimage of who he'd been mere days ago – could have told the truth. And knowing this, knowing he could collapse without warning and spill everything, ruin _everything_, Eri assumed a constant, fresh fear on top of her guilt and her longing. And because of the way these feelings knotted themselves acutely in her stomach, she thought nothing of how the seams of her being began to alter and diminish, and even disappear entirely.

Indeed, it didn't seem very strange at all that after some weeks of suffocating anxiety her appetite shrank until she could barely stomach even the thought of a cup of tea.

She began to wake up in the middle of the night with crippling nausea.

She was always tired, sometimes dizzy – naturally, didn't it make perfect sense that she should be weak when she teetered daily on the face of an abyss? When she pined nightly for Mirio like he was the food she wasn't eating and the sleep she was missing?

He was so close!

He was so far!

And everything inside of Eri began to hurt. Enough so for Kai and Chrono to start noticing.

"You're pale."

"Why have you been crying so much?"

"You've gotten thin."

"Stop squirming. It can't hurt _that _badly."

It _did_ hurt _that_ badly. Every time Kai touched her, Eri felt about sure she would split in two. His hands became too heavy on her skin, like two cups full of poison. He'd claw at her breasts and she'd want to scream; his hips grating against hers in the middle of the night became more unbearable than ever, too full and raw. And no matter how much she asked him to stop, he didn't stop. On the contrary, he would go harder. Harsher, until Eri was gasping through tears and reeling against a piercing new bout of nausea.

Was it really so excruciating to miss somebody? Doubts and qualms began to dig themselves into her.

It took vomiting into her own lap before Eri was forced to admit that something was actually _wrong_.

They'd been producing. She was in that slick, cold chair with her wrists strapped down and the skin peeled off from her forearms so that her muscles were bared raw and brilliant beneath the LED lighting. There were machines drawing out her blood and plasma, there were wires pumping unnamed solutions into her veins. Obviously, these things had always been sapping. There were always weird side effects: numbness, pain. But not like this.

"Kai."

He was busy with her skin at one of the tables, plucking it apart like it was a piece of deli meat.

_"Kai."_

"What, Eri?"

"I don't feel well."

"It's not much longer now," he said gently. "Bear it for a few more minutes."

"No… I really don't–"

He turned to glare over his mask. "I said–"

She got sick all over herself. Or not herself, exactly, but close enough for her to be ashamed of it. Chrono had been paying enough attention to have grabbed a large bowl and thrust it into her lap before she made a mess. She hadn't eaten. The only thing that came up was bright yellow bile and a ghastly burn through her throat. It kept coming. There was nothing in her stomach. But it kept coming, and Eri tasted chemicals, smelled her innards, felt her face grow wet with more tears. Then she sort of blacked out, and was only hazily aware of Chrono cleaning her face and Kai carrying her to bed.

* * *

The next day, she was in a doctor's room with Chrono. The walls were a pale grey, basking in natural light and hung with an abstract print that looked either like mountains or a naked woman – to avoid looking at Chrono, Eri spent a long time considering the picture seriously. Not only the art, but the anatomical diagrams hung around it too, and the textures on the walls themselves, and the grain of the doctor's desk. Leather seats. A warm smell like winter coats and old lady perfume to mask the familiar power of disinfectant.

They hadn't been waiting long – no longer than five minutes perhaps – but Chrono was antsy, and fidgeting in his seat next to Eri. He sighed, neither impatiently nor with any particular relief when the doctor finally walked in, a thin folder in hand.

An old man, he looked softly at Eri and smiled. "Hello young lady," as though they were perfectly familiar with each other. He greeted Chrono too with no less mildness as he rounded them and took a seat on the other side of the desk, opening up the folder and considering the form Chrono had filled in at reception. "Yorinaka…" he murmured their fake surname ponderously. "A new patient! Lovely to have you. I'm–" he said his name. Eri forgot it immediately. "What can I do for you today?"

Both he and Chrono looked expectantly at Eri, and for a moment her mouth hung open. "Uh– uh- I've been feeling... strange."

"Mmm? Strange how, my darling?"

"I don't know. Just _strange_."

"Tell him your symptoms, Eri."

The doctor cocked his head at her and continued to smile, as though he had all the time in the world, while Eri offered up her symptoms slowly and sheepishly – having hardly considered them to be 'symptoms' until now. He prompted her on with nods and careful hums, and occasionally looked away to scribble notes into his folder. Eri stared in fascination at his handwriting. It was the worst she'd ever seen. Even worse than Kai's, which was a confused hieroglyph at the best of times.

"Are you on any medications?"

"Umm… A few?" She looked to Chrono.

"Some supplements. Prescription painkillers."

The doctor made another note. "Have you recently experienced any changes in lifestyle, Eri?"

"Changes?"

"Anything that could have disrupted your usual routine, sweetheart. It could be something as simple as a new diet, all the way to the loss of a loved one."

She blinked, and stewed for a moment on the loss of a loved one. Did foiled affairs count? She shook her head. "No."

The doctor leaned in towards her, hands sewed together over the folder. There were a few more neutral, easy questions which Eri was able to answer with simple nods and simple head shakes. Sometimes she'd have to look to Chrono for help.

At last, the doctor closed his folder. He considered Eri gently, as though she were the only other person in the room. "Now, the next few questions are perfectly routine considering your symptoms, but they are of a sexual nature and may be sensitive." His eyes flashed with surprising pointedness towards Chrono, and then back. "Would you prefer to answer them privately?"

"I'll be staying with her," Chrono said sharply.

The doctor's smile did a funny twist. "Is that alright with _you_?"

Eri shrugged half-heartedly.

"Eri, it's up to you."

She glanced to Chrono, who gave her a loaded look in return. "Please can he stay," she murmured.

"Alright." There was a pause in which the doctor looked between the two or three pages of forms and notes. "Are you sexually active?"

She nodded.

"Do you use any contraceptives?"

"Uh – no – not… really."

"Not really?"

Chrono cut in, "Eri had an oophorectomy a few years ago."

"Ah." It surprised Eri that the doctor didn't seem very surprised. Maybe he hadn't heard Chrono correctly, because the next question he asked was clear and unshaken, "Have you considered the possibility that you might be pregnant?"

Eri would have laughed had Chrono not interceded again, this time more insistently, "She's not pregnant. I've already said she had a–"

"Stranger things have happened, Yorinaka-san," the doctor said with a tender force that seemed to take Chrono aback. "Perhaps a hundred years ago an oophorectomy would have made things clear-cut. But in this day and age, it's not quite so. The body is capable of some fantastic things, no? Now, this is only a consideration amongst a number of others, my darling, so there's no need for you to look so alarmed." The doctor closed his folder. "If you'll take a seat on the table for me, I'm going to do some simple checks. Then I'll take samples for blood tests."

Chrono, less confident now, asked quietly, "How long until we'll know the results?"

"Oh," the doctor nodded, "I'll be able to give them to you in about fifteen minutes once I have the necessary samples."

* * *

They were given permission to wait in his office while the tests were conducted – apparently their appointment made provision for the time it would take, so it was no imposition to any of the other patients. Chrono sat in stolid silence, legs crossed, his eyes glued to a magazine he'd fetched from the waiting room though it was clear he was doing no reading. Eri couldn't sit so still. She moved between the posters stuck to the wall: the muscular system, the skeletal system, the brain. She read names and forgot them immediately. She looked at the photos on the doctor's desk – he had a wife (assumedly) who looked older than him, and three daughters or nieces or… what had Mirio called them again? God children?

The doctor may have been open to the idea that Eri was pregnant despite the obvious facts. But even if the quirked body _could_ do such spectacular things, Eri's was not so special as that. She wasn't pregnant. She wasn't worried she would be, nor was she excited by the possibility. Not in the slightest.

"Kurono-san."

"Mmm?"

"What if–?"

He didn't look up from his magazine. "There's no what if. You're not pregnant."

Of course she wasn't. He was perfectly right to be so collected, so utterly unruffled by the doctor's suggestions. Yes, it was strange that Eri's symptoms were exactly like the early signs – the doctor had pulled up a charmingly illustrated chart and pointed out exactly why pregnancy would make food unappealing, why it would make Eri so tired and sore as though every inch of her were bruised. He'd even gone so far as to ask if Eri had experienced any 'spotting'. Spotting? Implantation spotting. And with a breathless shock, Eri had thought of the blood in her underwear after that last night with Mirio. She'd cut up the material and had thrown it away (_just in case_) and had thought nothing more of it.

There'd been so little blood anyway, and she'd only put it down to the fact of having slept with someone new. Someone who'd felt rather, well, _bigger_ than what she was used to. Really, that would easily explain the blood. So she told the doctor no, she hadn't had any 'spotting' even though something started screaming inside of her and had left her face flushed hotly.

"Do you like kids, Kurono-san?" Eri questioned absently, picking up the picture of the doctor and the three girls – teenagers in the photo, all with clouds of curls about their faces and bright, wide smiles redolent of the doctor himself.

Chrono looked at Eri with an ambiguous expression. "What do you mean?"

"Just."

He blinked at her. "I've never thought about it." And he looked back to the magazine, made a thin attempt to seem like he was reading by turning the page.

Eri hadn't ever thought about it much either. Whether she liked children, that is. But as a teenager, she'd day-dreamed enough about being a mother that she could only assume she probably did like children even though she knew close to nothing about them and would probably have made a terrible mother – good thing she wasn't going to be one. Right?

The clocks in the room ticked. One on the wall. A digital one on the desk. On Chrono's phone, which he checked doggedly and more frequently the more time went by. Eri sat down when the sense of creeping nausea began to ooze about her insides, and she breathed measured breaths without fully feeling the oxygen reach her lungs. The fifteen minutes passed. Another five. Longer still.

Everything inside of Eri screeched to a smoking, sickening halt when the door opened at last. When the doctor held her gaze with calm, unreadable smiling. The door closed again. Chrono's fists were clenched in his lap just as Eri's ribcage seemed to close in around her heart.

"Well," the doctor said, and laid out a number of papers across the desk. "We did a double check to be certain."

"And she's not pregnant," Chrono said.

The doctor didn't bother looking at him. Once again, he only looked at Eri. "You are pregnant, sweetheart. Five weeks along."


	22. xxi

_xxi._

Overhaul didn't have much in the way of routine. He left the house sporadically, often at the unholier hours of the morning or evening like a creature of the shadows, turning off around odd corners and then simply, as if by magic, disappearing entirely before anyone was able to tail him. Sometimes he'd go nowhere, wandering aimlessly in the hazy twilight to the edge of the street and back as though having changed his mind or forgotten something.

Restlessness? Or a diversion?

The only sure thing was that every Thursday night – that which for so long had stood out with promise and splendor in Mirio's mind – he would leave the property from the back entrance at nine p.m. and then return in the passenger seat of the black car (inconspicuous models, always with a different number plate) at roughly two or three a.m. Still, he'd been impossible to follow, and after so many weeks nobody had been able to figure out where he went or with whom.

In all of this Mirio took part from a distance: a removed observer, not a hero but an assistant and businessman above all else. He himself had and would have nothing to do with Overhaul – at least not right now – because he knew, and Nighteye knew, and all the heroes who came and went probably knew that Mirio would try to kill the man the moment no window nor wall nor street separated them.

To simply see him through the window was enough to strike Mirio's heart with an arctic hatred, black in its purest variety.

Somehow, he looked no older than that day thirteen years ago. Thinner, perhaps, and with something more agitated about his ways. No beak. No blood. Still, to see him made Mirio shudder back into memory: how the bullet had felt through his back, the stone spire through his side while Overhaul had told him to die. _Die now, Lemillion._ Blood going drip, drip, drip onto concrete, as red as the cape Mirio had draped around Eri's shoulders – and Eri! How horrified she'd been; how quiet and shattering the look she'd given him when Chronostasis had swept her up and Overhaul had ghosted her away. Into that darkness. Over the ocean. Away. Away like Mirio's quirk. Away like every precious thing in the world.

Mirio hated him.

But then there was Eri!

He glimpsed her in the mornings, when everything was still bathed in pale light and the sun hadn't quite lost its youthful hue. The smell of night still in the air. Her hair wet whenever she opened the front door and lingered there, thick books in hand, an oversized jersey hanging over her like a blanket. It was never long, and Mirio could never see her after she disappeared into the garden – but he liked to think, or he knew, that she did this for him. That she appeared on that front step every morning knowing he could see her, that he was right there.

On Sundays, she went to the market with the man she'd originally called her brother-in-law, now confirmed to be Chronostasis. Without fail, they walked there and back within two hours. Sometimes, she'd be with Overhaul when he wandered the street. He'd put his hand in the small of her back. She'd let him. And Mirio would squirm on the inside, doing nothing to step away.

He'd learned all this about Eri – little though it was – while watching through a window.

Just as he'd watched earlier this morning, a Tuesday at 08:30, how she'd left the house not with a book but with a new uncertainty which was almost heartbreaking. She'd drifted into the backseat of one of the black cars (new number plate) and Chronostasis had climbed in next to her. Then off they'd gone. That had been two hours ago, with Nighteye and Bubble Girl having dashed out the door to follow. Since then, Mirio had paced the stairs with cups of coffee going cold in his hands.

Eraser Head had arrived two days before. Slouching, a very Aizawa-sensei-esque knowing in his eyes, he watched Mirio hawkishly.

"She's fine, Togata. This is just an unusual hiccup in their schedule."

His hair had gone silvery at its roots, drawn back in a low, scruffy ponytail. After having married one of his former students, he'd gained some weight and some wrinkles.

Mirio sighed. "I don't know about _fine_… She didn't look good."

"Don't overthink it."

"Do you think he's done something to her?"

"Besides what he's already done?"

There was a certain edge to Eraser Head's voice which made Mirio go quiet. He sipped his coffee, tasting nothing. Paced again.

Eraser Head rubbed at his nape, heaving a heavy breath. "What do you plan to do when all of this over?" He stood from his place, knees cracking, and buried his hands into his pockets. "Because it won't do to simply throw Eri into a normal life. She's going to need counselling. Quirk training, after everything's that happened."

Surprising himself, Mirio smiled. "Has this been on your mind?"

"I only want to make sure you're being logical."

Very Aizawa-sensei-esque.

"I don't know what I want to do exactly, at this point. I just want to be there for her."

"I'm sure you've considered the fact that she could be the key to returning your quirk."

Mirio stared at him for a moment. "I have." Then he looked away. "But that's not what's important to me right now. Honestly, I accepted long ago that I wouldn't – you know, that I wouldn't be able to get it back. My quirk. So I don't expect that from her."

"Are you quite sure?"

"Why do you say it like that?"

Eraser Head laid his hand on Mirio's shoulder. "Don't take this the wrong way. I don't doubt that whatever you feel for her is very real. But loss is a funny thing. After everything, you could projecting a lot of feelings onto Eri which have less to do with her than they do with–"

"Oh, yeah, I get that," Mirio said quietly. "Believe me, I've stayed awake enough nights now to have thought about it over and over. And I'll admit, a small part of me hopes that maybe someday something will work out to bring things back to the way they were. With my quirk, I mean. But like I said," he smiled, "right now I only want to be there for Eri. Regardless of what might happen."

Ponderously, Eraser Head hummed. He looked about to speak again when one of the sensors in the upstairs room began to go off – harsh, muted buzzing which set a shiver through Mirio's soul, which could only have meant that Eri was back.

* * *

The entire way back home, Chrono had been quiet and petrifyingly hard to read, staring out the car window with a scrunched look which made him look old and hard as marble. Now, walking stiffly up the path to the front door, he clutched Eri's hand, fingers curling around hers in a near-frantic crush and tugging her sideways into the garden. Eri couldn't explain the panic it left inside her – the motion of it was sudden, a not wholly-welcome rupture in the silence of the last twenty minutes.

_Pregnant. _She was pregnant. But she didn't quite feel anything for it. Not yet. Maybe not ever, for which she did feel guilty.

Chrono clearly felt something for it though. Something not good, which was why he'd seemed about ready to tear the doctor's throat out when it had been confirmed over and over – with another blood test, with an ultrasound (blue-black splotches which were supposed to be Eri's ovaries nestled comfortably beneath a 'gestational sac') – that she was pregnant. She. Was. Pregnant.

Chrono guided her to the bench beneath the magnolia tree, and they sat down together without a word. The petals had grown paler. They littered the grass in moon-curved patterns like fragments of porcelain or ivory. It was quiet in the garden. It would have been a peaceful morning, were it not for the urgency which bristled in the air. Eri, crushed beneath the weight of Chrono's continuing reserve, shuffled and fidgeted, and thought about Mirio across the street. He wouldn't be able to see her here – it was too sheltered, cornered off behind the wall and the magnolia – and for once, Eri was grateful for it. She felt about ready to crumble. Sick and dizzy and struggling to breathe. He couldn't see her like that. Not now when everything hung precariously in the balance.

Chrono said her name. It was weak, a dying breath. And when he looked at her, pulling down his mask to reveal a thin, anxious frown, he may indeed have been staring death in the face.

"Please tell me it could only be Kai's."

As yet, neither of them had called it a baby.

"I don't know."

"I see." If he was disappointed or surprised, he hid it well. "_I_ _see_. Well then."

Ashamed, horrified, terrified and spinning with nausea, Eri bowed her head. "I don't want it to be his." She wished desperately that Chrono would hold her hand. Instead, he only ran a trembling palm across his face. "But–" Eri added. "But – would it help? If it were. Would he let me keep it?"

"No."

"_But–_"

"He'll only do things quickly and quietly if he thinks it's his. But Eri," Chrono's skin had turned a faint shade of green, and he refused to meet Eri's eye, "we're not going to be able to convince him that it's his."

"Why?"

"For one thing, he already suspects something."

Everything drained from Eri's face and chest, and she was sure for a moment she had no pulse.

Quickly and quietly, Chrono continued, "Like it or not, he knows you better than anyone. It's only because he doesn't _want _to believe that you're capable of… well… _this_. That's the only reason he hasn't figured it out for sure – but he's seen it in the way you've been acting. How attentive you were a few weeks ago, and how cold you've become since that night I caught you." His expression faltered. "I have to give you credit though," he said bitterly, "it's also because you've been smart. You know him too well too. You've been able to make him trust that you're still his. You've given him no evidence to suggest otherwise. I'm still trying to understand how you managed–"

"I can do it again." Eri was resolved. "He won't know. He won't find out."

"He'll know."

"He won't–"

"He had a vasectomy, Eri. When you got married."

Things ground to a halt. Eri's mouth hung open for a long time, without words, without breath. "Oh."

"Yes. _Oh_."

"I didn't know."

Not to say she'd had any business knowing. But the fact that he'd done it, and the fact that she'd never been told, came as something of a slap in the face. Or was it a relief? He was just as dysfunctional as she was, in a way.

Chrono made a harsh, uncomfortable sound. "I have been thinking about it though – since that godforsaken doctor asked you about your quirk. He said there was a possibility that you, being of a childbearing age, possibly wanting to – you know. You could have unconsciously rewound your body to a suitable state." He pressed his fingers to his mouth, as though too aghast to suggest any further potentials. "If that's the case… I suppose you could very well have accidentally reversed Kai too."

Eri shook her head. "I didn't mean to." As though it were certain.

"Obviously."

"I want to keep it though."

"What?"

And just like that, she began to cry. She could have stopped it had she felt the tears – but no. Nowadays, there were no warnings. "I don't want him to hurt it – the baby – _my_ _baby_," she spluttered. "It's not his. It's _not_. But he'll gouge it out of me and feed it to dogs or throw it into the ocean and I don't want – _I don't want him_. I want Mirio – I want to go away."

Over the past few weeks, whenever she'd start to cry like this, Chrono would only sigh. He'd only leave the room in an impenetrable hush, as though it was no business of his. And perhaps it wasn't. But really, it kind of was. This time though – and it shocked Eri into near-tearlessness, the pain of it swelling in her chest without release – he cocooned her cheeks in his hands. For the first time in the entirety of their history, he kissed her forehead. Once. Twice, murmuring apologies in between.

"I'll fix this." Four times. Five. "I'll keep you safe. I promise. I'll keep you safe this time."

* * *

**A/N: This is it. This is the second-last chapter before the end. **

**What ever could our dear Chrono have up his sleeve this time...?**


	23. xxii

_xxii._

Being able to put a name to all the pains somehow made them less painful. Eri still felt sick, of course. Every muscle still felt taut and sensitive like the strings on a violin, pricked to attention. But now that she knew it wasn't all just a symptom of longing – oh no, it wasn't that at all, just her steadily growing a second body inside of herself – it all became a little more bearable.

Ironically enough. Being as it was that she would have taken anything over being pregnant. Anything at all.

Kai was in the casual lounge. The television was on, set to a Russian news channel though it seemed to offer little more than background noise. That awful green juice was in a glass and half-empty on the coffee table. Everything smelled of him – clean and warm, familiar and despicable – and everything _felt _like him – heavy, crushingly so. He fixed his gaze on Eri and Chrono, golden eyes making everything go cold. Cold and hateful. Eri hated him. She didn't hate him. She hated the fact that she didn't hate him, and that some part of her wanted to crawl into his arms and plead for his forgiveness.

Worse still was that it really would have been a relief. Like how much of a relief it had been after that first year in Russia, when he'd used her and then had held her after such a long time of nothing. It would have been a comfort to have been held now after Eri had woken up alone that morning. They hadn't shared a bed in case she was sick. Germs were the devil, after all. And god, was the feeling of that empty bed shattering in inexplicable ways. She'd cried. She'd curled herself into a ball on Kai's side, smelling for traces of him through her tears until Chrono had come in to wake her.

Kai held her eye, not saying anything for a while. Weighing his words, perhaps? Considering all the possibilities and suspicions he was pretending not to harbor?

"_Well_?"

The simplicity came as such a gut-punch, Eri almost imagined the not-yet-baby squirming inside of her.

Things were quiet. Clumsily, Chrono cleared his throat. "It seems Eri's symptoms are largely hormonal," he said eventually, too bland and false. "The doctor put it down to stress."

Kai didn't believe him. "Stress."

"That's right."

His eyes met Eri's again. "And tell me. What exactly are you stressed about?"

He suspected. He knew. "You've just been so busy lately," Eri said. "You go to so many meetings, and whenever you make the bullets you… take a lot more than usual." Gentle, careful. Exactly like Chrono had told her to say it – and indeed, Kai's eyes softened faintly. "I'm tired all the time and I don't like it when you're gone."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, Kai."

Back to Chrono. "And what exactly did the doctor say we're supposed to do about this _stress_?"

"Good diet. Frequent exercise. Naturally, I think we're going to have to halt production. Eri was given explicit instructions to take things easy for a while so as to not place any unnecessary strain on her body."

"You know we can't do that."

"We're going to have to. Unless you want her to _completely _shut down, which would be even more disastrous for the entire enterprise." Gentle, careful. As though Eri wasn't right there. Chrono's hand found its way onto her shoulder, and his voice took on a shuddering, suggestive tinge. "Besides which, like she said, we've been overworking the process anyway. You've got more than enough bullets for this month's delivery to Dimitri, and if next month's stock is a little under the count – well, the bastards will just have to accept it."

Kai stood, and came close. He spoke to Chrono but was looking at Eri. "So stress, then. Nothing else?"

"No," Chrono said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Kai hummed, and touched his hand to Eri's cheek. "Alright." Then he swooped past her into the passageway, speaking over his shoulder with unnatural flatness. "I will make contact with Dimitri about the situation. Tell the maids to bring tea to my study."

And he was gone; Eri and Chrono stood side-by-side, stiff and listening to the light tap of Kai's feet receding across the tile. They'd expected him to be angry, to insist and argue. The silence with which he accepted it was so much worse. So much more bitter and frightening. Eri's head spun. Absently, she stroked her fingers against her stomach until Chrono smacked them away – harsh though the motion was, it was probably the kindest thing.

"Now what?" she murmured.

Chrono spoke in a near-whisper. "Be attentive. Act like you really do want him around so that he lets his guard down. I don't know. Whatever you were doing a few weeks ago worked wonders." There was that sour tinge again. "He told me you initiated sex once or twice."

Eri felt herself blush violently, voice too full in her throat. "Why would he tell you that?"

"I'm his friend." If Chrono felt anywhere near as self-conscious as that time they'd surfed women's health websites together, he showed none of it now. No. He he looked cold as a gravestone, and empty. "Do it again tonight," he said. "When he comes to bed. And pretend to enjoy it. It'll help if you can get him to relax – everything else will run much more smoothly afterwards, if you can do that."

"I don't want to do that."

"Well, Eri. I don't exactly want to do _this_ either," Chrono spat. "But I'm not going to let him hurt you or that baby. If everything turns out right, you won't have to bother with any of this ever again – so it's your choice. Do your part or don't." He watched Eri, and after a while sighed. "I'm sorry. Please don't look at me like that."

"_I'm s_orry."

"For what?"

"All of this."

"Well – you fell in love."

Eri nodded feebly.

"And sometimes these things happen."

"Would you have run away with Anya?"

The question didn't seem to take him by surprise. Perhaps nothing did, anymore. He shrugged. "Maybe."

And that was the end of that. Chrono disappeared into the depths of the house. Eri asked the maids to make tea, and sat dazedly in the kitchen while they did so.

Before, the window through which she'd always climbed had taken on a certain life of its own. Something hopeful and glowing, a gate to heaven when the morning light hit _just so_ like it did now. However, the window had come to be neglected, a rusty escape hatch which no longer did so well in keeping secrets – being as it was that Chrono had taken to sleeplessness, and had made a night-time routine for himself drinking too-strong coffee and guarding the house's exits. Funny to think that she wouldn't need the window tonight.

One of the maids had a teapot and cup ready on a tray. She smiled awkwardly at Eri; Eri smiled awkwardly back and took the tray. It was a little sad that after however long, Eri knew close to nothing about this maid or the other. Not even close to nothing – it _was _nothing. She wasn't even sure she remembered their names. They were just women in the background, as there'd always been women in the background throughout Eri's life. Quiet. Obedient. Lives of their own completely hidden, like a taboo.

There was that squirming again. Could five week old 'gestational sacs' squirm? Eri thanked the maid, and left in a hurry.

* * *

Kai wasn't busy. Had he been, he wouldn't have looked up from his laptop when Eri came into his study. His focus was sharp, a new clarity in his eyes which was beautiful and severe, and which left pinpricks up Eri's arms as he watched her place down the tray. His gloved hand found its way onto hers before she could pull away, holding her there, fingers weaving, stroking her knuckles in a beckoning gesture. They were both still, both quiet for a while; then with his free hand, Kai pulled down his mask and told Eri to sit.

She did. Right into his lap. Like a little child.

In a stunning contrast to the clearness of his gaze, there was a murkiness about the rest of his expression. Suspicion and caution threaded through his lips. Curiosity at his eyes' corners. Startlingly soft, he brushed a piece of hair behind Eri's ear and allowed his fingertips to linger along her temple. "You know I want you to be happy," he said quietly, in a way that didn't make Eri very happy at all. "Don't you?"

Somehow though, she did know it. In a twisted sort of way. "I do."

"And you know that things have changed since you were little."

"Yes."

"But not enough that you can get away with lying to me." Around the back of her head, Kai's hand coiled into her hair and clutched a little too harshly. One pull and he could easily have snapped her neck. "Would you lie to me, Eri, _my love_?"

He only called her that when she was in trouble, as though he knew it struck Eri with a blunt force she couldn't explain. She couldn't tell him no though, because he'd know. But she couldn't tell him yes either, now could she? The only thing to be done was to keep a straight face. "What would I have to lie to you about?" she asked.

"A lot of things, I'm sure."

"Like what?"

"You tell me."

Resisting the way he held onto her hair, Eri leaned into him. She smiled. "I don't know, my love."

They were close enough for his breath to ghost against her cheeks. Slow, measured breaths which betrayed no sort of feeling in their warmth. His grip remained unyielding, though the look on his face was something close to tenderness as he took Eri in. He kissed the tip of her nose. Her lips. The first kiss on the lips in weeks, and it was surprisingly easy to let him do so even though her spine ached. Even though her ribcage felt too big for her body.

But that night, when Kai came to bed just after midnight and kissed Eri again, the ache flared into agony. It was the sort of kiss where his tongue found its way onto hers, where saliva spilled and his hand wrapped itself around her throat like he wanted to strangle her. He'd done it before. Would it hurt the baby for him to do it again? Would it hurt the baby, the way he lay himself on top of her as though to crush the air from her lungs? He touched her now knowing exactly where it would hurt most. He bit her collarbones and below, hard. Fingers wet with lubricant and still gloved. Everything was too harsh, too fast, too heavy, and he made Eri say his name. Over and over again. And to keep her eyes open. And to look in his, so that it was him-him-him with no space for Eri to pretend he was Mirio.

Even if he didn't know it. Even if he wasn't doing it on purpose. Eri was supposed to pretend to enjoy it and she did her best, but the things inside of her seemed to rip open with every back-forward movement of Kai's hips. It hurt. It hurt so much. And she couldn't banish the thought of the baby inside of her, and of Kai inside of her, and of all the confused feeling inside of her to think of Mirio instead, like she'd done for so many days, weeks, months now to make it all more bearable.

That afternoon, she'd packed two bags which were now pushed far behind the dresses and shoes in her closet.

She'd thrown the matryoshka in with her things. Kai hadn't noticed it missing from the dressing table.

And though it was supposed to be tonight – Chrono had promised it would all be over soon – it seemed an eternity before Kai finally came, and collapsed onto Eri in a heaving, sweating mess. He fell asleep like that, twisted in with her limbs and the sheets, skin-on-skin, and Eri could only lie there awake and wondering how easily sex caused miscarriages. How long it would take before Kai was no longer engraved on to every part of her like chippings in stone. Would there ever come such a time? Would Chrono actually make good on his promise?

More than that – Eri wasn't so sure she really had the strength to make good on it herself.

An eternity. An eternity of petrified paralysis. Then the door opened, too shrill and too slow, but not waking Kai as he breathed steadily into Eri's neck. She twisted her head on the pillow. There was Chrono, silhouetted like a ghost in the darkness with one finger to his lip and a package in his other hand. Moving slowly, slower, slower while Eri's heart raged. Not looking at her but at Kai. Always at Kai, who seemed to move and murmur and sigh a thousand times in the space of a few seconds.

Eri wasn't sure about it anymore.

In the garden, she'd been certain that this was what she wanted.

But as Chrono revealed a syringe, poised on Kai's side of the bed and watchfully moving to pull away the sheets from his neck, Eri hesitated. Eri lay frozen and horrified at the fact that Chrono was doing it and she was letting him. She was letting him, and she was letting herself run away from the only life she'd ever known. From Kai, who was _all she'd ever known._

"Wait!"

Everything started. A flash. A fury. Chrono sprang back too fast and suddenly Kai was awake and there was a bloodcurdling shout as an open palm went flying outwards in no specific direction and Eri was thrust away. Then he – Chrono? Kai? It was Kai – collapsed back into the mattress, staring in a seething agony or rage Eri couldn't place as the arrowhead of Hari's hair slithered backwards into place. Something smelled of blood, rich and metallic. Too close. Eri couldn't figure out what had just happened.

"What–" Kai rasped, horrifically slow, like he was choking on his own voice, "– is– the–"

Through the darkness, Chrono sounded to be on the brink of tears. "I'm sorry." There appeared the syringe again. "I'm so, so sorry, Kai."

The needle piercing Kai's neck was a sound Eri would never forget. Light and silent. Gorishly plush. There was the crash of his teeth gritting, and the way his fingers went stiff and wide against the mattress in search of her. In search of Eri, like she'd abandoned him. Oh god, she'd abandoned him. His eyes rolled in his head. He tried to say words which only came out garbled and, in a way, terrified. Then he was completely still, and completely quiet, and Eri began to drown in the realisation that she'd betrayed him – she'd betrayed him – she'd betrayed him. Out of body, she caught herself saying his name. She caught her hand against his cheek, his chest, nudging as though in hopes of waking him.

Chrono was saying something she didn't hear. Everything was black and grey and piercingly white, like a nightmare in slow motion. Kai wasn't waking up. Eri was trembling so that her very insides seemed to fall out of place.

Chrono held her shoulders, and jolted her into looking at him though she could hardly make out his face through the dark, dazed hallway closing in on her.

"Breathe, Eri. Breathe – in and out – he can't hear you. The tranquilizer should have been strong enough, but we need to move now. Please, Eri, breathe. _Breathe_."

Telling her to breathe when he hardly seemed to be breathing himself.

Then he was throwing a jersey over Eri's head because she'd forgotten that she was completely naked. And then he was taking out a new syringe from the package he'd been carrying, and was quivering as he carefully eyed the solution he filled said syringe with. He angled the needle against Kai's neck once more.

"What's that?"

He looked at Eri. "What do you think?"

"Tranquilizer…" she murmured absently. "Why more–?"

"No. It's not tranquilizer." The solution disappeared into Kai's veins. "It's almost sad, isn't it, how the very thing one spends their life creating is also the thing that's used against them? That seems to always be how it goes."

Eri didn't really understand. Or she did but she didn't know it, and so only stared at Kai's face – his peaceful, quiet face, like he was only sleeping and would wake up to her any moment. Things would be fine. Things would go back to normal, and Eri would never see Mirio again; she'd be all Kai's and wouldn't question it, wouldn't betray what she'd taken for granted for so long. Clothes were thrown onto the bed next to her. Jeans. Pink sneakers she hadn't ever worn, and which looked small enough to be a child's. Behind her, Chrono was pulling her bags out from the closet.

* * *

"They're in the street!" Bubble Girl cried in a whisper. "Coming right this way!"

Everything was a mad frenzy. No one should have been leaving that house at this hour, on this morning of blue shadows and starlight, let alone marching _straight towards them _through the darkness. The night vision binoculars were passed from person to person in the upstairs room, where the lights were off and everyone was still with anticipation and hesitation, most of them in pajamas. When at last Mirio got to see, everything inside of him went cold. Eri was there. She stumbled gracelessly behind Chronostasis, her hand clutching his as he pulled her along the street. And Overhaul? What did he have to do with this?

It was the question on everyone's minds, but not the important one in Mirio's. Instead, he wanted to know about the bags slung over Chronostasis's shoulders, and why he kept looking back to Eri and the house behind them with such a desperate, rushed insistence. Mirio wanted to know what it was that kept Eri looking everywhere but into the window, to him.

"Did she out us, Togata?" Nighteye said, a tender look through the darkness to show he didn't really believe what he was suggesting.

"No. She couldn't have – she wouldn't."

But it did seem too good to be true, didn't it? How surely Chronostasis strode up to the gate, undoing the bolt with a disconcerting certainty and then heading unhesitatingly for the front door.

There was a resounding chorus of whispered swear words. Eraser Head and Nighteye, the oldest and most experienced of the group, exchanged looks. Then the room, and the entirety of space and time, froze to attention when the doorbell chimed. Once. Pause. Twice. Three times. _Dingdingdingdingding_. And when no one made a move to answer, a banging began against the door itself. The fisted thuds rang themselves ruthlessly down Mirio's spine, like a spent cloth being squeezed too tightly, and before he realised it he was up. Halfway down the staircase. No one trying to stop him.

Indeed, no one _did _stop him. Instead, pros flew down the stairs alongside him and slid themselves up against the walls like pack-hunters at the ready. Waiting. Fiercely awake for the hour.

Mirio saw his hand stretch out for the door, the banging deafening now and sending white throbs of panic before his vision. He imagined Eri. It was like he could _feel _her – so close, something wrong. Something was very wrong. But despite the feeling, he halted obediently when Nighteye clutched his wrist.

"Wait. Just wait."

Mirio waited, though not with any easiness. He watched Sir's face – the way those sharp features twisted, widened, relaxed in the ghostly purple glow of Sir's eyes, and when everything fell back into shadow Nighteye looked at Mirio with an expression wavering between sorrow and… something else. He stepped away. He touched a hand to the hyper-density seals he kept on his waist band (even of his pajamas) at all times and turned his attention to the door, an unspoken affirmative. The go-ahead Mirio wouldn't have needed had Sir seen something besides whatever he had, something perhaps much worse than what was to come.

Mirio breathed against the stale air in his chest, and reached for the key in the lock. The door flew open mid-knock, onto the night beyond. Onto Chronostasis. There he was! Right there! A specter. A vivid hallucination of white and contorted features. And there stood Eri – no, there came Eri tumbling into Mirio's arms like the moon falling from the sky. She seemed so fragile. Trembling, like years ago.

"Eri!"

"_You_."

Ripping his attention from Eri in his embrace, Mirio met Chronostasis's eye – and it was clear, it was horrendously and almost gorgeously plain, that the man recognised Mirio for the first time. Even in the haziness of the hour. Even through the mask of age. He hadn't recognised him at their first meeting at the market. Whatever Chronostasis knew now, he obviously hadn't expected _this_, because he stepped back with a sick ripple about his features and stared hard at Mirio as though at a nightmare image.

In the house around them, the air was thick and prickling. Nobody moved. Everybody waited.

Mirio narrowed his eyes, and held Eri tighter against him. "What's going on?"

Chronostasis said nothing, only continued away.

"I said–"

"Mirio," Eri murmured, and the sound was sweeter than anything. He hadn't heard her voice in so long. God, it was electrifying. Her hands closed into fists against his shirt, and she heaved a stuttering breath. "This isn't– I'm _sorry_–"

Dropping the bags before himself, Chronostasis made a hiss of an expression. Almost pained. Furious. "Take her."

The world sank away. "Excuse me?"

"Take her. _Faraway_." Chronostasis kicked the bags forwards. "Make sure she takes her iron supplements every morning. And that she gets a good doctor. Fuck, just take care of her. Love her. Do what you will. Just _take her_."

At the sound of the gasps and hushed mutters about them, Eri had lifted her head from Mirio's chest. She glanced about like a frightened doe, disbelieving and slow. Mirio, however, kept his eye firmly fixed on Chronostasis, who too continued to glare. He seemed reluctant to leave. Reluctant to stay. His gaze returned continually to Eri, and Mirio – in spite of his better judgement – was sure he saw heartbreak in the man's face. Subtle but distinct, like the rainbow-tinted cracks in a mirror.

Eri began to struggle in Mirio's grip. She pulled away. "Kurono! Wait! Please, please wait!"

It was not heroic. It was not the sort of action Mirio should have taken – that is, he did nothing. Although then again, the heroes did nothing either. Some of them shuffled. Some began to move. But Nighteye stopped them all, and Mirio was left to stare as Eri threw her arms around Chronostasis's shoulders, as Chronostasis ducked out from her hold and instead put his hands on her cheeks. He whispered something to her, too affectionate and true in his tenderness, and then kissed her. On the lips. A quick, brotherly kiss that did not make Mirio jealous nor furious so much as it perplexed and terrified him.

Then Chronostasis was off in a sprint beneath the moonlight, fleeing to the house and leaving a confusion behind him. Eri stood there on the garden path for a long time, watching Chronostasis leave her. Mirio stood there in the doorway for a long time, watching the air about Eri shimmer and crumble until she fell to her knees. Until she was crying and shaking and saying nothing sensible at all.

* * *

They were in Mirio's rental car. The radio was on – not coincidentally to Present Mic's newest late-night show – and turned down just enough to be distracting without being disruptive. Streetlights strobed through the windows in warm, calm oranges. Eraser Head drove, saying nothing as he wound through Kagoshima's empty streets, only glancing occasionally into the rearview mirror at Mirio.

Eri was okay. Eri was not okay. She was wrapped in a duvet and curled tiny into Mirio's side, her head on his shoulder and her breathing only just beginning to take on a more normal rhythm. At the house, she'd gone ghostly pale, black-out stiff at the sight of so many heroes – so many strangers – closing in on her. It had taken a half hour and a good dose of painkillers for her to calm down. It had taken a half an hour more for her to explain. But once the words had come out, no one questioned it. No one disagreed when Mirio cossetted Eri into the backseat of the car, or when Eraser Head climbed in as the driver. Now the three of them were headed to the airport. They'd use Eraser Head's hero license to book emergency tickets to Tokyo. From there, Mirio would take Eri to his apartment in Musutafu.

The raid on Overhaul's operation had been compromised. With the slivers of information Eri had been able to give them, Nighteye and the others would move onto the house as soon as Eraser Head returned. The clock was ticking.

Mirio didn't care.

He brushed his fingers up and down the delicate curvature of Eri's nape. He held his lips to the top of her head, where thhe hair was knotted in perfect white clouds. It felt like it had been forever; it felt like it had only been a day. But she'd gotten so thin, and her hand in his lap was tiny and cold. She mentioned once or twice that she was carsick, and Eraser Head would decelerate slightly in preparation to stop. They never did, and the city gave way to suburbs, and the suburbs to highway as the distance between them and the airport closed.

"Mirio?"

"I'm here."

"I need to tell you something."

"Anything."

Eraser Head turned the volume up slightly in what could only have been a poor but sensitive attempt to give them privacy.

* * *

**A/N: See you in the Epilogue, everybody!**


	24. Epilogue

Epilogue

_3 Years Later_

Without his quirk, the name Overhaul meant nothing. It was but a memento, pathetic and sentimental, of foiled aspirations and a hypocritical hope. Yes, even he knew it was hypocritical – even_ he _could see the irony in it all. And yes, he'd tried to kill Hari for it. More times than he cared to remember: with guns in drunken stupors, in his dreams by driving the car into the ocean. That was until Hari decided to leave too. Indeed, even Hari left him. Fucked off to Russia to find that stupid fucking whore on whom most of the blame lay for all of _this_.

She was the one who'd made Hari spoil Eri in the first place. She was the one who'd put romances and fantasies inside of Eri's beautiful little head. _That stupid, fucking, quirkless, worthless whore. _What power did she have that _he _didn't? What power was power enough to have driven even Hari away, to have made even Eri bold enough to do _this_?

This.

Eri.

Without Eri, the name Kai was meaningless too. She left, and a part of himself went with her. He couldn't explain it. He hadn't known it until she'd been nowhere to be found – all this time, almost twenty years, she'd belonged to him without him realising that he'd belonged to her in equal measure. Every part of him had been – was – hers. His everything. Not even second to his quirk. Which is why it made sense that, without her, it would have been more sensible for him to simply kill himself: with guns in drunken stupors, in his dreams by driving the car into the ocean. However, in between measuring out enough sleeping pills to constitute a lethal dose (though never taking them) and drinking himself into a coma (never enough to not wake up though) he looked for her.

He had few resources now, but he used every one of them. He had a lot of cash, and the right people were always willing to offer favours for the right amount. He scoured the country. Feeling constantly like he only ever just missed her. Finding traces of her everywhere – in certain textures or smells or shades; strangers who smiled at him on trains; in flower shops, where he remembered that Eri liked lilies and that he'd never once given her any; shadows in the night which he always thought were her but which never were.

"Have you seen this girl? Have you seen this woman?"

Sometimes no. Sometimes yes!

_Eri_!

It was in Takayama that he finally found her. A greasy, teenaged shopkeeper near the train station had recognised her photo. "Oh! That's Eri-neechan," he'd cooed, mouth swollen with braces and pale plaque – it was hard to decide which was more revolting, the boy's ungodly lack of hygiene or the familiarity with which he said Eri's name. "Do you know her?"

"I'm her husband."

"Oh shit! Hectic dude."

"Where is she?"

"She's – oh, well, actually, dunno if I should say, you know? You look like a real classy guy and all, but I get the feel that there could be some weird domestic dodgies going on, if you're actually her husband. Eri-neechan's always been super sweet. Comes here all the time with little Kei-chan and–"

"Well then where will I find this _Kei-chan_?"

"I mean, she's Eri and Togata-san's daughter, so…"

Daughter.

He left then, and wandered aimlessly with the sense of his bones weighing themselves into the ground. So she'd kept it. So it was a little girl. So it was Lemillion's. Did it have Eri's eyes? Would it one day have Eri's quirk? All these questions raked themselves through him in furious, sickening obsessions. Hari had been right. He would have ripped the fetus out of Eri's body and torn it to shreds better than any dog would be able to do. He'd imagined it many nights over, he'd imagined making Lemillion watch. But the more he'd imagined it, the less he'd imagined it until eventually he'd started to harbor a small hope instead.

But no. It was Lemillion's. And it would probably have Lemillion's eyes. And it would probably have Lemillion's quirk.

He asked around for a few more hours with any number of stories until finally, he arrived at the edge of town before a stone house. Sakura carpeted the front wall in dazzling pinks, dotted with the pale green of budding leaves and making a tremendous mess of petals along the pavement. The gate was low and feeble, easily unlocked; and inside, the front garden was bathed in afternoon light. Sun glinted off the house's windows in shimmering mirages and cast a glow about the lilies. Lilies everywhere in stellar whites, and blue hydrangeas, and bruised-purple irises like jewels against the sliver of lawn.

And on this sliver of lawn there was a wooden table. And at this wooden table there was a little girl with mittens on her hands and two curling ponytails of dark, dark hair. She kicked her legs happily beneath herself, and babbled on in a little voice like a chime. And on the seat next to her was Eri. Eri, who looked up when Kai froze on the path to the front door. Eri, whose face fell from sweet curiosity to sweeter horror, and who glowed like ivory dusted with blush beneath the hue of the sakura tree.

She held him there. He held her there. And perhaps noticing how the air took on a sharp, bristling urgency, the little girl looked up too from the colouring book in which she clumsily busied herself. First to Eri. Then to Kai. She smiled – and even a few paces away, her honey-dawn-molten golden eyes struck a stake through his heart.

"A visitor-man!" she cried, like a bell. An exquisite little church-bell.

"No. No, my _apple_," Eri said, the 'apple' being Russian instead of Japanese. She placed a hand down on the table, standing straight so that she broke the space between Kai and the little girl named Kei. She looked taller. She was wearing a boyish t-shirt much too big for her, and her arms looked strong. Lithe and tanned, and more beautiful than beneath the scars. "He's not a visitor."

"Who then?"

"He's nobody."

Nobody. The girl cocked her head in a question mark heartbreakingly reminiscent of Eri herself.

Eri never looked away. The horror remained, but slowly gave way to something much sharper. Slowly, watchfully, she placed her hand on the little girl's back. "Kei," she said, eyes still fixed. "I want you to go inside and call daddy, okay? Tell him mommy says he needs to come home right now."

"On the big phone or the little phone?"

"It doesn't–"

"No," Kai interceded pointedly. "Let her stay."

"_No_."

"Please."

"Kei, go inside. _Now_."

Kei looked between Eri and Kai, torn. Golden eyes wide and familiar, and settling on Kai in an inkling look of questioning want. Like she knew just as well as she did. Like seeing him had struck some violin-string chord inside of her just as much as it had inside of him. Reluctantly, she stood – hardly the height of the table, a baby doll – and began to bop her way towards the front door. But Eri stopped her. Told her to use the back instead, and so off that dark-haired, golden-eyed, Eri-miniature went. Away. Away from Kai so that it was him and Eri alone.

After three years, him and Eri alone in a foreign garden. She'd cut her hair, wisps gathering in cloudy-curls about her jawline. The plum-coloured shadows had disappeared from beneath her eyes. There was an unfamiliar colour in her face, and as Kai came closer – indeed, she didn't move to stop him now that Kei was gone – he began to notice the fine texture of freckles across her cheeks. Freckles! Eri was prone to freckles!

"I've been looking for you," Kai said eventually, the only space between them now being the width of the table. "You look well."

"I want you to leave."

"Don't be cruel."

"Mirio will–"

"Kill me? That wouldn't be very heroic of him, now would it?" Kai sneered. "Sit, Eri. I just want to talk."

Eri's face – elfin and unnecessarily lovely now that Kai was seeing her for the first time in years – contorted into a vile, painful expression. Her fist closed on the table so that her knuckles flared white. It was the strangest thing because it seemed to Kai that Eri had never ever made a fist before. Not with such intention. "Then talk," she said. "And once you've had your say – please. Leave us."

Wordlessly, keeping his own gaze entangled with hers, Kai made a show of taking a seat himself. The wooden table was tiny and uncomfortable, but he found his place and gestured once again for Eri to sit too. She did so. So close. He could have reached out and touched her. He did reach out and touch her, hand to her cheek, its burnished colour soft and warm through his glove. However, she pushed him away. The motion was shattering and humiliating in a thousand ways, profoundly gentle though it was.

"You're not wearing a ring," Kai noted.

"Mirio and I aren't legally married yet."

"Because you're still _my_ wife?"

Eri narrowed her eyes. Not angry. Defiant. She'd made the face once or twice before.

"Legally," Kai added, "at least."

"But not in the ways that matter."

"Come back to me, Eri." He hadn't thought about what he'd wanted to say. At first, he'd only imagined wringing her neck and then dragging her unconscious body through the streets. Then it had been become more methodical, more refined – chloroforming her in the night and slitting Lemillion's throat in their shared bed. Now, it was different. Lulled by the golden warmth of the afternoon and the small victory of having found her at last, he wanted Eri to come back on her own. "Things will be different. I'll take care of you."

Eri stared at him with the plain impression that he'd lost his mind.

Kai laid his hands onto the table in an attempt to appear reasonable. Now too, there was the little girl. Eri was a mother. "And Kei-chan–"

"Please don't say her name."

"Does she know?"

"Know what, exactly?"

"Oh, please, Eri. Absolutely nothing about that little girl reeks of Lemillion." Kai's heart did a nauseating jump. He swallowed on the feeling. "Tell me about her."

The colour in Eri's face flared to life. "Excuse me?"

A door slammed somewhere close by, and there appeared a pitter patter like rain. Zooming in from around the corner, Kei came rushing. Pink dress flapping about her little legs like the petals of an upside down flower. The dark ponytails bouncing boldly against her temples. She beamed at Kai like he was an old friend – it was Eri's smile. But there was so much in that face that wasn't Eri: the sharp nose, the high cheek bones plushly hidden behind baby fat.

Clasped between her mitten-clad hands was a blue box bigger than her head, and as she hurried closer she held it out as though presenting a wedding gift. Unabashedly, she swooshed past Eri to Kai's side of the table, and ignored the shrill way Eri squeaked out her name – or nickname. _Apple_!

"This! The photo! I finded it!" Kei cried, and placed the box delightedly onto the table. She scrambled onto the seat next to Kai, oblivious to the agitation with which her mother stood, and grinned while taking off her mittens. She had freckles too, Kai noticed, and he caught himself beginning to count them. "Mommy," she thrust out her palms. Her hands, her tiny fingers, were white as rosebuds. "'Anditizer, please. For me and the man."

Kai raised an eyebrow. "What on earth–?"

Eri frowned. She picked up a little bottle from her seat. "Hand sanitizer." She squeezed a drop of clear solution into Kei's rosebud-hands. "Kei thinks hand sanitizer is very important."

"And for the man?"

With deeply-tracked lines and a ferocious light in her eyes, Eri's frown deepened. "He's wearing gloves, baby. He doesn't need hand sanitizer."

"Please, Mommy! He needs!" Kei turned to smile at Kai again – those eyes, even more brilliant up close and rimmed with ebony-shadowed lashes, imprinted themselves harshly onto his memory. "Right, Ojisan?"

"Yes. Right." Kai cupped his hands. Held them out to Eri. "If you'd be so kind."

Her look spat indignity like sugar-flavoured venom. But she obliged.

The mittens were back on, and Kei threw open the box. Inside, there were photos. "I know you," Kei said, and began to pick out pictures like she was plucking fruit from a bowl. "I seen you before."

Eri sat back uneasily, saying nothing. Not objecting. Not stopping. A startling multitude of emotions crossed her face as she watched Kei and as Kai watched her. He was handed photographs with polite, sugar-spun requests that he "please hold" and that he "look, look"; he accommodated these requests in a hard hush, eyes dropping to the pictures and all the while feeling a vile mix of hate and interest and longing grow in his stomach.

There were photographs of a heavily pregnant Eri: cross-legged on picnic blankets and holding her apple-round belly, smiling like Kai had never seen her smile before, all pink-cheeked and dewy. Then there were photos of a not-so-pregnant Eri: sleeping in white bedsheets, her back and arms completely bare; drinking coffee; twirling in a pile of autumn-toned leaves; at the beach. Kai had never taken her to the beach before. Had she liked it there?

There were photos of a squealing, pruned-up newborn; first locks of dark hair, first teeth, first steps. Kei in diapers. Kei in dresses. Kei eating donuts. Kei, living a whole three years of life.

And then there were photos of the man who'd stolen all of it away. Too close to Eri. Too close to Kei. Not her father.

He wasn't her father.

And god, Kai cared a little too much.

Exultantly, as though it were a victory of her own, Kei shoved another photo into Kai's hands. "It's you!"

Him it was, in a suit and bow tie. And an eighteen year old Eri in a green, satin dress, clutching his arm and looking wide-eyed at the camera with a smile which looked less like a smile and more like she was on the verge of tears. That was the night Anya and goddamn Dimitri and his goddamn father had thrown an engagement party. That was the night Eri found out she and Kai were going to be getting married. She wasn't supposed to have found out, but fucking Anya could never keep a secret.

Though apparently she could. Hari could too, when they really wanted to.

"She likes that photo," Eri said quietly. "For some reason."

Kei nodded, and held onto Kai's shoulder with an overfamiliarity which was – shockingly – not unwelcome. "I like Mommy's dress," she said, and giggled.

"I liked it too."

"Why are you angry in the photo?"

"Angry?"

"Look~" she pointed at the image of Kai's face. "You're like this." And she put her hands over her mouth in imitation of Kai's face-mask, and scrunched up her eyes in a way which looked very eerily like the photo. Like she'd practiced it in the mirror. Somehow, the thought was not surprising and very endearing. "Like you're angry."

"Oh," Kai said. "I was just thinking."

"About?"

"Your mother."

"Okay." Eri began to gather up photos and put them back in the box. Her cheeks were enflamed. The rims of her eyes had turned an irritated red. "That's enough now. Put these back where they belong, Kei."

"No, wait, Kei-chan." Kai took the first photo he could. "Tell me about this one."

"Ooh! That's my quick."

"Your what?"

Eri snatched the photo away. "_Quirk_. But you don't need to tell the man about that."

Kai snatched the photo back. "Your quirk, Kei-chan?"

"Uh–" she looked at Eri, suddenly insecure, apparently aware of the way the mood fluctuated and roiled. "Yes." Then more confidently. "Yes. My _quer_ck."

"But this isn't a photo of you." Kai looked at the image again – indeed, it _looked _like her, a disaster of brown curls and a gangly smile. But the child in the picture was at least thirteen years old. "So how is this your quirk?"

"It is me, sill-ee."

"But how?"

Violently, Eri's hands collided with the table. Kei jumped, knocking into Kai like a clumsy lamb just finding its legs, and she threw a startled expression in her mother's direction. Eri didn't look at her though. Eri looked at Kai with luminescent, rolling tears and a trembling bottom lip. She was standing again, and in contrast to the little girl Kai had known, she was immovable. Sort of terrifyingly, strangely exquisite. Kai tried to place where in their life he'd seen her like this, if ever.

No. Never. He'd never seen her like this. She rounded the table in a flash of graceful movement, scooping Kei up and away with a practiced precision. She whispered something. She kissed Kei's forehead – three sharp, loaded kisses on that perfect, white forehead – and turned away from Kai so that his heart plunged and an old fury flared with the viciousness of a scab being torn open. Next thing, Kei was wandering back to the back of the house, looking over her shoulder with all sorts of unspoken somethings.

That was his daughter. That was _his _daughter. _That was his daughter._

"She's mine."

"No," Eri said, still facing away. "She's Mirio's."

"Don't tell me you're fucking blind."

Eri sat back down. Not angry. Not defiant anymore either. Just sad. "Mirio is her father. You are just biology. I will never ever let her think otherwise."

Kai felt his features twist. "She knows something. She feels it."

"I know. She's too smart for her own good."

"Why are you crying?"

"Because she wants to know you. Because she looks exactly like you. I don't know."

Kai gripped Eri's wrist. It was not the same way as he'd always done it though, and she seemed to know it. She didn't pull away. "Please come back to me. Please let me be her father."

"Kai." Oh! His name on her voice! "If it had been up to you, she would never have existed," she said. "And I'm going to make sure she knows that. Mirio and I are going to tell her one day who her real father really was. If it's necessary, we'll tell her exactly what her real father would have done to her. What he did to me."

"I loved you."

"You used me." Eri slid her hand away. "You'd use her too. Her quirk–" she stopped short. Breathed unsteadily. "It manifested very early."

"How?"

"She fast-forwarded herself into a teenaged body. Then she rewound herself back a few hours later."

There could be no explaining the emotion Kai felt then. It was sort of like ecstasy when it should have been disgust – he should have been the man to hope his child would be quirkless; yet, here he was, relishing the little being he and Eri had created. That was his daughter. That was his power. He'd never been more proud of anything, though he knew close to nothing about her. Besides that she was a little too smart and a little too fearless. Besides that she was a little too curious for her own good, and she liked hand sanitizer, and she leaked an infectious, gorgeous, awful loveliness which the world would surely try to steal away.

As if by instinct, he looked towards the house, and there she was in the window. Mittens pressed up to the glass, breath fogging up before her face. Kai smiled behind his mask, feeling a strange fullness in his chest. He waved. Kei waved back.

To be able to fast-forward. That was exactly what he had been missing all these years. That was exactly what he needed to be able to make the antidote. He'd never been able to do it with Eri. She couldn't reform something already-rewound by rewinding it further – her power could never _return _quirks. Only take them. But Kei…

"How's Kurono?"

"What?"

"Kurono," Eri murmured. She blinked at him. She wiped her wrist across her eyes. "How is he?"

"Oh." Kai's face melted back into a frown. "I don't know. He went to Russia. So he's either dead or he's run away with Anya."

"Oh."

"He missed you."

"I miss him." Eri's lips folded in on themselves to hide their tremble. "I waited to hear from him. For a long time."

"You could have stayed," Kai said a little too bitterly. To his surprise however, Eri didn't shrink. Eri didn't squirm. She didn't do anything, resolved in her decision. He sighed. "He told me why he did it. That after what Anya went through, he couldn't see the same thing happen to you."

She pulled a face. "What do you mean?"

"Anya's abortion." Kai furrowed his brows. "Didn't he tell you?"

"No. I had no idea."

"Well," a shrug, "now you do." He looked again to Kei in the window. "I want to speak to her once more."

"No."

"Let me."

"Mirio will be home soon."

"I'll keep it short."

After some seconds of crushing, contemplative silence, Eri looked to the window too and waved in a beckoning gesture. Motherly. Soft. Reluctant. Kei vanished into the house's depths in a flash, and Kai listened carefully for that pitter-patter from the back garden. In the meantime, he considered Eri again. "Why did you keep that photo of us?"

She shrugged. "It was folded up in my matryoshka doll. I just never threw it away."

Tap-tap-tap-tap. Kei was back around the corner in a flurry of unsteady footing, and she climbed herself into Eri's lap with a gasping rush of excitement and bewilderment. Indeed, she was a porcelain doll version of her mother, and Kai – in seeing them both across the table, Eri kissing the top of Kei's head and Kei grinning at Kai as though he were the most fascinating thing – felt bowled over by a very unfamiliar sense of beguilement, a slightly more familiar jealousy, and the most familiar possessiveness.

Leaning in towards them, he searched Kei's face for more traces of him. "So Kei-chan. What's your favourite colour?"

"White!"

"Do you have a favourite food?"

"Daddy hides jelly beans under my pillow when I've been good."

"So jelly beans?"

"Yes ~ the purple ones 'specially."

As she spoke, it was possible to see one of her incisors had grown charmingly skew. "And tell me," Kai pushed around the photos on the table, "do you visit with all these heroes a lot?"

"Why are you asking her all this?" Eri narrowed her eyes, absently brushing the bangs from Kei's forehead.

"I just want to get to know her a little bit," Kai replied. "So, Kei-chan? Who do you think is the best out of all the heroes?"

She made a thinking-face that was neither his nor Eri's. "Aunty Jire. She sparkles. Like a fairy." Then she clapped her mittens together. "But! I think when Daddy 'comes a hero, he'll be the real best."

"Daddy wants to become a hero then." Kai shot a wicked look in Eri's direction. She shot one back. "Do you also want to be a hero?"

Kei shook her head.

"Oh? What do you want to be then?"

"Uh– uh–" She twisted in Eri's lap, and touched her hand to Eri's jaw. "What word again?"

"Scientist."

"A si-yen-taste!" Like being a scientist was the new equivalent of being a fairy. Or being god. "Or a maid!"

"_Excuse me_?"

For the first time, there was the glimmer of a smile across Eri's face. She turned away, and she laughed. She laughed – a short, honey sweet sound like the ring when circling the rim of a wine glass. Kai, in all their life, had never heard Eri laugh. He was struck dumb. How could he have never heard Eri laugh? "She likes to help keep things clean," Eri said, and brushed her hands over Kei's cheeks. "She dusts all her toys and helps wash the dishes every night."

Kai stared at her. His heart did stupid things in his chest. "Do you like cleaning, Eri?"

"Me?"

"Yes."

"Uh – I do, actually. A lot." Distractedly, she started braiding one of Kei's ponytails. "I like doing things around the house in general. I've made some friends who come once a week to garden with me."

"This is a nice garden," he lied. It was messy and overgrown. But he saw why Eri would like it, with all its petals of rich colours and sunlight.

"Thank you."

"Do you still read?"

"I don't have a lot of time to anymore."

"How come?"

She bundled Kei's hair in her hand, then let it drop in a gorgeous tumble of brown. "An unnecessarily intelligent two year old keeps me busy."

"I'm _almost _three!" Kei held up what could only have been three fingers beneath her mitten.

And Kai, not fully realising what he was doing until he'd done it, reached out and closed his own fingers around hers. He squeezed. The smile on Kei's face tightened for a moment before widening again, stellar and genuine. The skew incisor was the most wonderful little oddity Kai had ever seen. "What a big girl you are." He let go of her hand, and he looked at Eri. "Would you ever give me a second chance at making you happy?"

"Never," Eri said. The softness of her voice did not suit the sharpness of the word. Kei's face dropped, and she stared up at Eri in confusion.

"Well then." Kai fingered the photos on the table again. Kei in her short succession of forms. Eri, pregnant. Eri, not pregnant. Eri, no longer his. And Lemillion with the family which should not have belonged to him. With a happiness which _should have been Kai's_. In the photos, Kai saw Lemillion kissing Eri. Kai saw Lemillion cradling Kei in his arms. There they were! The three of them eating from a chocolate cake with a single candle in it, as though cake was really something worth photographing. And then there they were! At an amusement park with a tiny Kei strapped onto Lemillion's chest. And then there was Kei washing a window. And there was Eri running into the ocean.

Photographs of everything Kai hadn't realised he wanted. All of them fuzzy with the incandescent, bright quality of afternoon sun glinting off their gloss. Some tattered at the edges. One of a shirtless Lemillion – vain bastard – had a lipstick stain on it. When Kai looked up, Kei was watching him with an uncertain, scrunched expression. Like looking in a mirror. A young, girlish mirror.

"I want to take one of these," Kai said, and gave Eri no time to object. "You owe it to me."

Thinking for a moment, Eri loosened her arms around Kei's tummy. "Choose a photo for the man, Kei," she said. Then as Kei shot about her work, Eri said to Kai, "You can have one. _One_. But there's a condition."

"And that would be?"

"You will never ever try to see us again."

Kei paused. "Mommy…"

"Don't argue. This is grown up talk now."

A hard knot made its way through Kai's throat. "I used to say that to you."

"You used to say a lot of things to me I wouldn't want my daughter hearing," she replied, disconcertingly gentle. "Do you know what photo you want to give the man?"

Kei shifted her gaze again uncertainly, clutching a photo to her chest. She glanced at it, at Kai, at Eri, at all the other photos, deliberating like Kai hadn't known an almost-three-year-old could do. Then she handed it over, and Eri made an uncomfortable sound.

"Oh – uh – that's a nice choice, Apple, sweetest," she said. "But I don't think we can give him that one."

"Why, Mommy?"

"It's Daddy's favourite."

"You're right, Eri." Kai ran his thumb over the bent corners, and committed to memory the picture of Eri and Kei. Plain. Simple. Them laughing. "It is his favourite. I'll take it." He folded it in two, pressed it like a secret into his coat pocket. Then he leaned forward to tap the tip of Kei's nose. "Thank you. I will take good care of it."

"Okay. Say goodbye to the man now."

"You can call me Kai."

Kei leaned out from Eri's lap, one hand balanced on the table and the other tapping Kai's nose in return. "Byee byee, Kai-ee."

He left with an empty burn in his gut, a rapid raging in his chest which refused to be quelled. Though he didn't allow himself to look over his shoulder, he could feel Eri's eyes in his back. Perhaps more importantly, he could feel Kei's – those golden irises like the springtime dawn, those he'd never expected and now wouldn't ever let himself forget. Ever.

Hari would have liked her. No, he would have adored her like she was the secret to life itself. And in some cavernous part of himself – less angry, less proud – Kai was grateful, because he knew that Eri was right. And that Hari had been right. Had it been up to him, he would not have allowed that little girl to exist. That exquisite, extraordinary creature who was inarguably and inexorably his, his, _his_. Even if Eri had convinced herself that it could be any other way. Even if Lemillion thought he could steal everything from Kai and then simply go on playing house.

Eri may have been happy – yes, he saw it, he knew it, she was happy and happiness had made her into the most beautiful thing the world could ever churn out – but it was not enough for Kai if she could be happy without him. After all of this. After everything. Her gaze vanished from him, and when at last he allowed himself to turn around, she was gone. Gone with Kei into that lovely house, probably to wait for her lovely _Mirio_. Aching, Kai touched at the photo in his pocket. There was a condition. He'd never try to see them again.

Funny, since Eri was in no position to be making demands...

* * *

**A/N: Well now, that's all (...?...) folks. Thank you x infinity to everyone's who's followed, favourited and reviewed. Your feedback is always so appreciated. Also a special shoutout to the special soul SilverIcy, who encouraged me to keep writing this story when all I wanted to do was delete it from existence. XD **


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